The question stayed with me - Do you have to go to the bathroom and eat to be alive? - because it seemed to me that Breazeal's intent was to cite the most basic acts required by human bodily existence, and then see them as ridiculous, even humiliating.

But after a while I cam eto the conclusion: Maybe yes. Given the amount of time living creatures devote to food and its attendant states - food! the stuff that sustains us - I decided that, yes, there might be something crucial about the necessities of eating and eliminating that defines us. How much of our state of being is dependent upon being hungry, having eaten, being full, shitting. Hunger! Our word for everything from nourishment to passionate desire. Satisfied! Meaning everything from well fed to sexually fulfilled to mentally soothed. Shit! Our word for human waste and an expletive of impatience. THe more I thought about it, the more I decided that huge swaths of existence would be impenetrable - indescribable, unprogrammable, utterly unable to be represented - to a creature that did not eat or shit.

In this sense, artificial-life researchers are as body-loathing as any medieval theologian. They seek to separate the "principles" of life and sentience - the spirit - from the dirty muck from which it sprang. As Breazeal put it, they envision "a set of animate qualities that have nothing to do with reproduction and going to the bathroom," as if these messy experiences of alimentation and birth, these deepest biological imperatives - stay alive, eat, create others who will stay alive - were not the foundation, indeed, the source, of intelligence; as if intelligence were not simply one of the many strategies that evolved to serve the creatural striving for life. If sentience doesn't come from the body's desire to live [...], where else would it come from? To believe that sentience can arise from anywhere else - machines, software, things with no fear of death - is to believe, ipso facto, in the separability of mind and matter, flesh and spirit, body and soul.

[...] About her robot Kismet she says, "We're trying to play the same game that human infants are playing. They learn because they solicit reactions from adults."

But an infant's need for attention is not simply a "game." There is a true, internal reality that precedes the child's interchange with an adult, an actual inner state that is being communicated. An infant's need for a mother's care is dire, a physical imperative, a question of life or death. It goes beyond the requirement for food: an infant must learn from adults to survive in the world. But without a body at risk, in a creature who cannot die, are the programming routines Breazeal has given Kismet even analogous to human emotions? Can a creature whose flesh can't hurt feel fear? Can it suffer?

sail away from the philosophical shoals of