Morality of the Indestructible Robot

Ethics
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Immortality as a Limit

The fact is that we are all “immortal."  I propose to consider immortality as an asymptotic limit: you do not know that you are mortal until you die.  For all you know, you could go on living forever.

You may have been injured; but you healed.  Just as the rebirth of spring follows the dead of winter, you go through cycles of high life and low, sickness and exuberance, sleeping and waking.

Rand’s robot could not be damaged or injured.  Injury suggests mortality, but does not prove it.  Regeneration is a fact of life.  It is well-known for starfish and octopi and reptiles, but is known also among humans. The liver can regenerate.  We shave, get haircuts, and trim our nails.  Everything seems to grow back – though sometimes a bit thinner on top…

An entity that always regenerated over decades, centuries, or millennia would be effectively immortal.  An injury that was only slightly and temporarily debilitating should be avoided, regardless of the entity’s ultimate immortality.  That reinforces Rand’s requirement that life is self-sustaining and self-generating.  In other words, whatever goal a living entity has the attainment of the goal becomes a value in itself.  It is impossible to have a goal without valuing the means of attaining it.  Therefore, the immortal robot would properly seek to avoid injury because the debilitation would impede the attainment of goals.

If it affects its environment, and if it can be (temporarily) harmed, then it must consider the consequences of its action.  It needs a morality.

Another way to approach this limit is from the other side: if your next action or motion could kill you, then you would need perfect knowledge to survive.  Life would be a constant game of Russian roulette.  The burden of choice might paralyze you into complete inaction.  Faced with instant death at the smallest error, you would need the unfailing morality provided by perfect knowledge.  That is the circumstance of a soldier in combat. A new-born baby, being totally helpless has the most need for morality - and absolutely no way to understand or achieve it.

(More later)

Thanks,

Mike M.

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In the sense of a thought experiment/scenario , does the robot’s immortality mean the self of the robot , the implicit awareness , cuz if not why the need for an entity/ agent in the hypothetical, does the embodied awareness ‘within’ the indestructible robot become/remain immortal, in principle? A ‘back door’ analogy to suggest an immortal soul?

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5 hours ago, Hermes said:

For all you know, you could go on living forever

So basically, we don’t know anything, for all I know, the Earth could explode any second, or I could go invisible, and for all I know, A is not A and being whipped and burned is the same as not being whipped and burned. If you can imagine it, it might be so.

I think there is an important step here that needs development.

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Hermès’ supposition doesn’t presuppose perfect knowledge of the self, well for all I know anyway. Is that the important step?

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“Can Art Exist without Death?” –K. Touchstone 1993 

It is false that for all one knows one will never die.

All animals are mortal, and we know that.

Puff away any element of the psyche not accepting its mortality;

get with the program of reality four square and full weight, full kinship.

Our ancestors died, you are going to die, I am going to die, . . .

and we know that rationally, including scientifically.

“Would Immortality Be Worth It?” – S. Hicks 1992

“Vegetative Robots and Value” – S. Boydstun*


**_All Along_**

Become some reason, then all along,

beneath each chant, arch, trance, and tear,

was known

stop-still of life, the end, no more,

no something, no place, no passage.             (SB – Oct. 2021)

 

 

**_Carriage_**

The strings of the harp

return to silence.

Gone voices echo

through living chambers.

Gone brows again rise,

gone but for your love.

Mind-crossed strides new-bless

your priceless carriage.                                  (SB – November 2019)

 

**_After all_**

the you or me and we

are stop, still, done, away:

all rush the world old play,

their rise, breathe, love their be,

their arms, words, eyes hold dawn,

race noon, bold burn their turn:

all rush the world old play,

their rise, breathe, love their be.                   (SB – January 2019)

 

**_Breath, Death_**

Ripples of stream and stone

    romance you.

You, breathing and climbing,

    you, earth’s courage,

    you, ripples of thought.

Grappling, singing,

    we wind our clocks,

    we together waking, walking,

    in life under death.                                   (SB – April 2023)

 

**_Once_**

Against all hours, days, devisings,

radiant axe and warming fire:

Pulse and grasp cease you. You stillness

gone from streams of light, space and time,

gone to snow once touched your flushed face,

to crester-stone once glanced the pond,

to pond, its laps of shore, their sum, 

to ice ceiling once you stood upon,

to sky once above all your loves.                    (SB – July 2023)
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17 hours ago, DavidOdden said:

So basically, we don’t know anything, for all I know, the Earth could explode any second, or I could go invisible, and for all I know, A is not A and being whipped and burned is the same as not being whipped and burned. If you can imagine it, it might be so.

I think there is an important step here that needs development.

David, I am an Objectivist. I am not interest in debunking or disproving or invalidating Rand’s ideas. However, I did run into a serious question. Rand placed the need for ethics in human mortality. Ed Hudgins wrote an essay on Transhumanism for the Atlas Society. It has been posted or linked on other sites, as well. On the “Galt’s Gulch” website of the Atlas Shrugged movie producers, one of the participants, username=Commander, asked me, if I compared transhumanism to Rand’s insistence on value as as the standard of morality. It was from that point that I asked the questions that I am posting here. 

If mortality is the basis for morality, then the question is whether the more secure and certain your life the less important is your need for morality. I believe that that is not true.

You ignored the opposite case of a newborn baby who has no way to assure its own survival and must therefore (from the premise offered in TOE) have the greatest need for morality and yet have no way to know that, even without attempting to achieve it. Unfortunately, Ayn Rand is not alive to answer our questions, so we have to work from the established canon of Objectivism. 

If we consider immortality an approachable limit, we can explore the importance of morality in context. 

Thanks,

Mike M.  

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8 hours ago, tadmjones said:

Hermès’ supposition doesn’t presuppose perfect knowledge of the self, well for all I know anyway. Is that the important step?

Ayn Rand said that the universe was created the day she was born and it will end the day she dies. She was speaking metaphorically, of course. 

Whether you know yourself in whatever sense “perfectly” or not you need to make good decision to enhance, extend, and improve your life. Aristotle termed it “eudaimonia.” I believe that this is the foundation for morality. Rand’s analogy of the immortal robot leads to the questions you raise about perfection. We commonly accept “perfection” as an absolute but, it, too must exist in an objective context: an entity might be physically perfect and morally bankrupt. 

Thanks,

Mike M.

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2 hours ago, Hermes said:

David, I am an Objectivist. I am not interest in debunking or disproving or invalidating Rand’s ideas. However, I did run into a serious question. Rand placed the need for ethics in human mortality.

One weakness in your argument is that we are not immortal. Another weakness is a smidgen of context-dropping. Let’s restore context (VOS p. 16): “try to imagine an immortal, indestructible robot, an entity which moves and acts, but which cannot be affected by anything, which cannot be changed in any respect, which cannot be damaged, injured or destroyed” (emphasis added). No action, or lack of action, changes the robot. Choice of action is irrelevant for the robot: there is no difference between a good action for the robot and a bad action. Morality guides choice of action, but only when outcomes are different. For the robot, all outcomes are identical. All choices avoid injury or pleasure or improvement for the robot. Actions have no consequences, in the case of the robot.

I object strenuously to the “as far as you know” argument, because you do not know that you are immortal, indeed you know that you are not immortal, and you know that your actions have consequences, some good and some bad. You need some sort of code of conduct to reach that end – death, or life, as the case may be.

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5 hours ago, Hermes said:

. . . Rand placed the need for ethics in human mortality. Ed Hudgins wrote an essay on Transhumanism for the Atlas Society. It has been posted or linked on other sites, as well. On the “Galt’s Gulch” website of the Atlas Shrugged movie producers, one of the participants, username=Commander, asked me, if I compared transhumanism to Rand’s insistence on value as as the standard of morality. It was from that point that I asked the questions that I am posting here. 

Kathleen Touchstone addressed your questions in 1993. How about you give it a read in the link I gave you? And give some acknowledgement of intelligent attainments long before ones’ own; indeed invent beyond the wheels already invented?

. . . 

If we consider immortality an approachable limit, we can explore the importance of morality in context. 

Why are you ignoring the offset in the approaching of immortality of the indestructible robot I gave in the 2007 composition I linked above? The laws of thermodynamics are always part of the reality context.

 

I mentioned this within a link I gave above. But I should perhaps belabor it for the more slothful. Rand set out and defended in Galt’s Speech the truth that value enters the world only where life enters the world (the concept ‘value’ presupposes the concept ‘life’); only life is the domain of values. The later, further support of the thesis by way of the immortal, indestructible robot thought experiment is not crucial to Rand’s case for her thesis. (Her thesis is correct and so is this later gedanken in support of the thesis).

There are no such things as suitability or fittingness or fulfillments or problems or solutions or meaning or alternatives or value or worth or struggle or perfections without their connection to the phenomenon that is living organism. The value of pleasure and happiness (or eudaimonia) and health and flourishing are followers on the driver that is life.

 

 

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8 hours ago, Hermes said:

 I believe that this is the foundation for morality. Rand’s analogy of the immortal robot leads to the questions you raise about perfection. We commonly accept “perfection” as an absolute but, it, too must exist in an objective context: an entity might be physically perfect and morally bankrupt. 

Thanks,

Mike M.

That last raises why “man’s life” - not one’s own life, and not that life’s duration - was, by AR, to be taken as the “standard” of value.

A “quality above quantity” (while not mutually conflicting) equation.

[The standard provides a “gauge” of one’s self-value and by which to assess the good/otherwise value-actions one pursues/regards].

The perfection concept- out of the mystical-intrinsic realms, which may still linger - is to my mind, not a completed state but a continuous progress toward the objective good.

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Quote

 

On 9/1/205 at 07:07 PM  DavidOdden wrote:

One weakness in your argument is that we are not immortal. Another weakness is a smidgen of context-dropping. Let’s restore context (VOS p. 16): “try to imagine an immortal, indestructible robot, an entity which moves and acts, but which cannot be affected by anything, which cannot be changed in any respect, which cannot be damaged, injured or destroyed” (emphasis added). No action, or lack of action, changes the robot. Choice of action is irrelevant for the robot: there is no difference between a good action for the robot and a bad action. Morality guides choice of action, but only when outcomes are different. For the robot, all outcomes are identical. All choices avoid injury or pleasure or improvement for the robot. Actions have no consequences, in the case of the robot.

I object strenuously to the “as far as you know” argument, because you do not know that you are immortal, indeed you know that you are not immortal, and you know that your actions have consequences, some good and some bad. You need some sort of code of conduct to reach that end – death, or life, as the case may be.

 

According to “The Objectivist Ethics” by Ayn Rand, mortality is the foundation of morality.

“It is only the concept of ‘Life’ that makes the concept of ‘Value’ possible.  It is only to a living entity that things can be good or evil.

“To make this point fully clear, try to imagine an immortal, indestructible robot, an entity which moves and acts, but which cannot be affected by anything, which cannot change in any respect, which cannot be damaged, injured, or destroyed.  Such an entity would not be able to have any values; it would have nothing to gain or lose; it could not regard anything as for or against it, as serving or threatening its welfare, as fulfilling or frustrating its interests. It could have no interests and no goals.” (page 4-5)

As offered, Rand’s immortal, indestructible robot is impossible. The postulate is internally contradictory.  Rand asserts that only a living entity needs morality, then she posits an indestructible robot as a counterfactual. However, the robot is alive. So, being alive is necessary, but not sufficient to explain the need for morality.

Rand says that it can move and act, but cannot be affected or changed.  That is another contradiction.  If it is to move and act, then it must change at least its location in time and space.

If Rand’s robot cannot be affected by anything, then it cannot affect anything.  Motion and action would be impossible.  In order to move by walking, it must press against the ground.  Similar considerations apply to motion by rocket reaction or field interaction: it must have an effect on other objects.  It must affect its environment.

However, all of that is irrelevant. The immortal, indestructible robot must be accepted as a thought experiment. The case is similar to Einstein’s posit as he imagined himself on a tram traveling ever faster to the speed of light. We cannot argue against the supposition on the grounds that the experiment is impossible: nothing can travel the speed of light except light. We accept the thought experiment in order to understand what happens as any entity approaches the speed of light.

So, too, here, the questions that I have are based on the thought experiment offered by Ayn Rand. I consider the immortal indestructible robot as a limit to be approached.

The essential and problematic distinguishing characteristic of the immortal indestructible robot (IIR) is its immortality.  If it cannot die, then it can behave in any manner, as no action would be morally consequential to it.  Whether it designs skyscrapers, jumps off them, or throws other people from them would make no difference. On the contrary, it does, would, and should make a difference to the IIR for the same reasons that those matter to me and hopefully to you.

Another consideration is that the immortal indestructible entity is God and the question then becomes, “Can God be moral?” That question is for a different time and place. Here and now, we are the subject. What is the basis for morality?

Morality is a guide to action to achieve your values. So, Rand asked, “What are values?” And “Why do you need them”

“I have, let’s say, sixty years to live. Most of that time will be spent working. I’ve chosen the work I want to do. If I find no joy in it, then I am only condemning myself to sixty years of torture. And I can find the joy only if I do my work in the best way possible to me. But the best is a matter of standards—and I set my own standards. I inherit nothing. I stand at the end of no tradition.” (Plume Ed., 1994. Page 16)

“One cannot collaborate on one’s own job. I can co-operate, if that’s what they call it, with the workers who erect my buildings. But I can’t help them to lay bricks and they can’t help me to design the house.” (Plume Ed., 1994. Page 569)

“Roark got up, reached out, and tore a thick branch off a tree, held it in both hands, one fist closed at each end; then, his wrists and knuckles tenses against the resistance, he bent the branch slowly into an arc. “Now I can make what I want out of it: a bow, a spear, a cane, a railing. That’s the meaning of life. … Your work.” He tossed the branch aside. “The material the earth offers you and what you make of it.” (Plume Ed., 1994. Page 577)

“But first, I want you to think and tell me what made me give years to this work. Money? Fame? Charity? Altruism?.. You see, I’m never concerned with my clients, only with their architectural requirements. I consider these as part of my building’s theme and problem, as my building’s material—just as I consider bricks and steel. Bricks and steel are not my motive. Neither are the clients. Both are only the means of my work. Peter, before you can do things for people, you must be the kind of man who can get things done. But to get things done, you must love the doing, not the secondary consequences. The work, not the people. Your own action …”  (Plume Ed., 1994. Page 604)

In Understanding Objectivism, Leonard Peikoff warns against the error of philosophical Idealism which attempts to deduce Objectivist ethics from metaphysics by a series of syllogisms.

I find a more consequential answers in asking question about values than in pursuing the problem of immortality. Otherwise, as I said at the top, the chain of logic leads to the conclusion that the safer you are, the less you need morality. And at the same time if you were totally unsafe, morality would not apply at all, which is  why Ayn Rand rejected “life boat situations” as academic challenges in philosophy.

Thanks,

Mike M.

 

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Roark is a karma yogi, his actions are ultimately motivated by right action alone.

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Actually, life is the foundation of morality. Death is not the foundation of morality, and mortality is the observation that all living things die. Certain things follow from founding ethics on life, rather than death, which aren’t captured in your re-writing of the Objectivist ethics.

You say that “As offered, Rand’s immortal, indestructible robot is impossible. The postulate is internally contradictory”. You’ll need to explain that for me, in particular the second sentence”. You also say that the robot is alive, which Rand does not say. What is your basis for saying that the robot is alive – a claim that you use to support the judgment of insufficiency?

I do agree that there is the appearance of a contradiction in “moves and acts, but … cannot be affected by anything, … cannot be changed in any respect”. There is a subtle difference between “cannot change” vs. the passive “cannot be changed”. Rand’s Robot can change, it just cannot be changed. Now, perhaps you had in mind a fancier scenario, that the robots position in the universe cannot be changed, so the Earth would have to move (unless the robot chose to move). A robot pressing on the ground does not change the robot, it changes the ground. It is correct that such an entity has other absurd consequences, that it would have to chose to follow Earth. This points to a chronic weakness in all philosophical hypotheticals since the time of Thag, the first philosopher: philosophical hypotheticals usually massively drop context.

The essential and problematic distinguishing characteristic of the immortal indestructible robot is its immutability: that its choices have no consequences. Whether or not the robot is immortal or has a definite terminus, pain and pleasure are indistinguishable aspects of its actions.

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Rand’s robot is Atman.

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In electrical engineering there are things called “ideal voltage sources” and “ideal current sources” which are used for the mathematical analysis of electrical circuits.

An ideal voltage source has a specific voltage, such as 20 volts, and it will produce whatever amount of current is necessary to maintain that voltage. This means that it can produce unlimited current and unlimited power, depending on what circuit it’s in. Shorting it out (with an ideal conductor) would literally create a contradiction.

Ideal voltage sources cannot exist in reality. A real voltage source has “internal resistance” and also has limits to how much current and power it can produce. This is why ideal voltage sources are “ideal.”

Still, one wouldn’t say that the mathematics of circuit analysis is invalid because of ideal voltage sources.

I think Ayn Rand’s “immortal robot” should be taken the same way. It’s an idealization; it sweeps away certain aspects of reality in order to isolate others for consideration. The isolation itself is merely a pedagogical device, not a foundation; it is not essential to Ayn Rand’s morality.

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On 9/5/2025 at 6:41 PM, necrovore said:

I think Ayn Rand’s “immortal robot” should be taken the same way. It’s an idealization; it sweeps away certain aspects of reality in order to isolate others for consideration. The isolation itself is merely a pedagogical device, not a foundation; it is not essential to Ayn Rand’s morality.

Right, the robot device should not be over-extended, I echo others. It’s Rand’s “depiction through extreme reduction” as I see it,  stripped of everything but the potential of activity. To drive her point home, I think the robot necessarily must be accepted to be *insentient*. Incapable of pain-pleasure–fear or comfort --wants and needs - or instinct - and therefore, of “value”. Although it could move and “act” like animals and men, it surely would have no need for motion (for the avoidance of pain/danger or a gain of security). To be consistent, it must remain frozen,an immobile robot. It would rate lower than an earthworm, of which “organisms”, etc, Rand wrote, indeed have “a standard of value”: their own continued, active lives; "that which threatens its life is “the evil” - and so on.

Those organisms’ ‘self’-generated and ‘self’-directed action (yet unconscious of “self” and value) is the common definition of ALL life. Only owning and maintaining a human life, a metaphysical given, is not the abstract “standard” of the good which rational-moral individuals will seek and measure up to (as opposed to the insects/organisms/etc.). Man’s life presupposes a high - conscious - value and set of ethics.