Inanimate things move, but they don’t move with intention.  Brute matter is a passive victim of causation: it moves by application of the physical laws of nature, mindlessly, like an electron that bounces around in its orbital or a rock that falls by the force of gravity.  A living being is different because he moves himself with intention; he desires to get something, go somewhere, avoid something, and so he moves.  He’s a perpetrator.

 

Life goes by many names but none capture it.  Aristotle called it anima and Aquinas called it soul, and they both meant life-breath, that which animates a living being.  Carl Jung said of it, “Soul is the living thing in man, that which lives of itself and causes life.  Therefore God breathed into Adam a living breath, that he might live” (from Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious).

 

We know it when we see it: living beings move but inanimate things get moved.  Imagine a cup on the table and now imagine a living cockroach.  Aquinas said, “The proper understanding of life is that something is capable of moving itself, taking move in a wide sense such that even intellectual activity can be called motion.  We say things which are moved only by an external principle are without life” (Commentary on De Anima). 

 

I call it self, and it means all these words like life-breath, anima, soul, homeostasis, will, mind.  At its core, self is me.  All living beings experience me: first-person awareness and a desiring (these being the elemental movements).  Every living being has first-person experience of his own self, and at its core, this is knowing where self ends and not-self begins, and he desires to keep it so.  Per Jung, “The individual Self is a portion, or excerpt, or representative, of something universally present in all living creatures…” (Psychological Types).  Three billion years ago, the first living beings knew this, that within this cellular membrane I-am and outside this membrane I-am-not.  I am that I am, and I want to continue this way. 

 

I don’t know what it is but I know it’s real.  So I say self and I accept that my word is wrong and I always regret the word.  Why? because static words can’t express movement.  Words pin down the moving into the still, but life is pure movement, never still.  The self is better expressed in music than sentences.

 

I’m alive, I desire, and so I move my Sauron’s Eye from here to there.  I think, I feel, I move my body.  Now compare a robot.  Robot doesn’t want anything so it doesn’t move itself.  People move robots: we build a robot’s locomotive structures, program it to move, supply the energy source for its movement, then we push a button to initiate the movement sequence.  A robot does what we make it do, like a knife cuts and a car drives. 

 

Why can’t robot move itself?  Because it doesn’t want to move.  Robot don’t care.  Think of all my words for self, words like life-breath, soul, will.  Robot has none of it.  Robot has no first-person self, no me, therefore it doesn’t care about anything, not even its own existence.  Robot doesn’t want to do anything.  A robot exists to fulfill human purposes, and when we’re done with the robot, we scrap it.  A self-driving car will sit in the backyard and rust away, and eventually it’ll never work again unless a person cares about it.