"We are not just stuff: just mind and body. We are beings who live in relationship to One who transcends all stuff: all space and time, all matter and all mind."

Rosalind Picard is a Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at MIT, where she directs the Affective Computing Research Group - a group focused on a field of computer science that she basically invented. Roz is also a TED Talks speaker and entrepreneur. She co-directs the MIT Media Lab's Advancing Wellbeing Initiative and was named one of seven "Tech SuperHeros to Watch" by CNN. If you read about Roz in a tech magazine, you'd likely assume she belonged to the growing tribe of atheists, agnostics, or religious "nones". And indeed, that's where she started. 

A Proud Atheist

Roz was not raised in a religious home. Her parents weren't hostile to religion. They just never really talked about it. But living in Atlanta, Georgia, surrounded by apparently Christian culture, Roz found herself early on feeling quite contemptuous of Christians. She thought Christianity was a crutch for the unthinking, and as a straight-A student with a growing love of science, she had no need for such a crutch. By her early teens, she considered herself a "proud atheist." But her assumptions began to be challenged when an undeniably smart couple invited her to church.

Avoidance Tactics

As a teenager, Roz earned money by babysitting, and after paying her for her time one night, one of the neighbors whose kids she'd been looking after invited her to church. Roz was caught off guard. These people weren't unthinking. The husband was a doctor and the wife was equally smart. They didn't fit her Christian stereotypes. But she politely evaded their invitation by faking a stomach ache and hoped they wouldn't ask again. They did. She faked another stomach ache. In the end, they got the message. Roz didn't want to go to church. But they were not deterred. They pointed out that Christianity was about what you believed, not just about church attendance, and they suggested she try reading the Bible.

Roz saw herself as the intellectual type. She wanted to be well-educated. She still believed Christians were foolish - that they had "concocted their faith out of some kind of intellectual weakness" - but as the Bible is the best-selling book of all time, she decided to give it a go. Rather than having her start at the beginning, her friends suggested she start with the book of Proverbs. "I expected to find phony miracles, made-up creatures, and assorted gobbledygook," she recalls. But to her surprise, "Proverbs was full of wisdom. I had to pause while reading and think."

Time to Think

This initial challenge began a whole process of thinking. One of Roz's teachers ran a "gifted" program that allowed her to direct her own studies. "I studied Buddhism, Hinduism, and several other faiths," she recalls. "I visited temples, synagogues, mosques, and other holy places." But rather than trying to find her way into religion, she was actually looking for the exit. "I wanted to get past this "religion" phase, because I knew I didn't want religion. But despite my wishes, an internal battle raged. Part of me was increasingly eager to spend time with the God of the Bible."

Roz went on to study electrical engineering at Georgia Tech. Again, a friend whose mind she respected invited her to church. This time, she went. But she wanted to raise her hand in the sermon to ask questions. In fact, it was through a gradual process of asking questions and sifting through evidence that Roz eventually decided to put her trust in Jesus.

This raised the eyebrows of some of her scientist friends. It still does. But as she puts it in this interview with New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, "All of our science rests on axioms and things that we take on faith. So people who think that they can't deal with faith are really just deceiving themselves. All people in science are accepting something on faith. The question is, "What is the evidence for that? And do you allow kinds of evidence that are not scientific?"

Computers with Feelings?

If Roz was looking for an exit when she started feeling drawn to belief in God, she had a similar desire when she realized that artificial intelligence would never come close to simulating human intelligence if it didn't take human emotion into account. As a young, blonde woman in the notoriously male-dominated field of computer science, the last thing she wanted to be known for was the study of emotion! In fact, she tried to talk colleagues into taking on the work instead of her, but she failed.

In the end, she reluctantly ran with the idea. As this Wired article puts it, "her manifesto was rejected from every peer-reviewed publication she submitted it to. In 1997 one reviewer suggested it was better suited to an in-flight magazine." But despite the initial skepticism, Roz persisted. In the end, the book she wrote spawned a whole new field of computer science, and her technology is helping people with epilepsy monitor seizures and people on the autism spectrum communicate emotional cues.

As an expert on AI, Roz is frequently asked whether scientists will eventually be able to make robots that are to all intents and purposes human. Her first response is that there is a much more fun way of making humans. But more seriously, much as Roz is committed to her research and the value of designing robots that can not only process complex information but also simulate and respond to the complexities of human emotion, she believes there is more to being human than a robot could ever achieve. 

Not Just Stuff

The famous physicist Stephen Hawking, who suffered from motor neuron disease, described the human condition like this:

"I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark."

As a teenager, Roz might have agreed. Now, she takes a very different approach. Rather than seeing humans as just incredibly complex computers encased in flesh, she believes we are far more than the sum total of our scientifically-measurable parts.

"We are not just stuff: just mind and body. We are beings who live in relationship to One who transcends all stuff: all space and time, all matter and all mind."

What makes us human is not a particular capacity, like intelligence, or self-awareness. Some humans will lack almost any capacity we could choose, and each of us will have any given capacity in varying degrees. What makes us human is our relationship to our Creator God, who calls us into everlasting fellowship with Himself. In a talk she gave at MIT, Roz observes,

"I know some people who like to ridicule Christians. I even used to be one of them, so I know about their pride. They call Christians "stupid" or "weak" or whatever makes it easy to dismiss them. I would like to say they are wrong, but the fact is they are more right than they realize. Compared to the Author of All Knowledge, every one of us sure is stupid. Compared to the Maker of All Universes, we are all weak. We can barely begin to comprehend what real Strength is."

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Link to previous features!

I've had multiple requests from people who have heard about this email series too late to catch someone they were particularly keen to read about, so I'm including a link in this email to all previous professor features, including Harvard professors Tyler VanderWeele and Ruth Okediji (see below), MIT professors Ian Hutchinson and Cullen Buie, UC Berkeley professor Lara Buchak, Oxford professor Ard Louis, and Cornell professor Praveen Sethupathy!

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