'Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus' : Mary Shelley's Prescient, 1821 Novel of Humankind's Attempt to Understand the Meaning of Life and the Soul

Note: "Frankenstein, the Monster..." (1821) should be a primer for every modern student and researcher in Artificial Intelligence. The tortured musings of the cobbled-together monster (Ai components) give clues two hundred years later to applying the (Alan) Turing Test for self awareness and developing algorithms for modern artificial intelligence machines.
-----------
This was written in response to a request for comment regarding Mary Shelley, the early 1800's author of Frankenstein: or the Modern Prometheus, (1818) and Shelley's place in the evolving thinking about the meaning of life and the soul. Although Shelly might not to be significant in a discussion of 19th century tinking on these subjects, this blogger (Pericles21) feels Mary Shelley's 'Frankenstein' is very important and played a central if not initiating part in framing the thinking about the soul, life and even artificial intelligence from 1818 to the Transhumanism movement of today. Mary Shelley wrote 'Frankenstein' on a dare in 1818 when she was very young and lacking a formal higher education especially technical (although home schooled by very well educated and devoted parents, the Godwin's) who were well known at the time in European intellectual and salon circles. Mary's father was the political philosopher William Godwin, and her mother was the philosopher and feminist, Mary Wollstonecraft. In addition to Mary Shelley's own varied literary works, she edited and promoted the works of her husband, the Romantic poet and philosopher Percy Bysshe Shelley and even is rumored to have assisted in editing the works of the great Romantic poet, Byron. But Mary Shelley's 'Frankenstein' still ranks as a leader in establishing a new literary frontier in human imagination that explores the most sacred areas of human thought, life and the soul.
--------------
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was a product of her times, circa 1800. She participated in the thinking and discussions of her times about the nature of life and the soul. Remarkably for such a young person (age 19 at the time she wrote her first work, 'Frankenstein' in 1818) and a woman without formal education much less technical education, she was at the forefront of thinkers of her time (though unknowingly at first) about these topics. In particular, Shelley was caught up in the excitement of new scientific concepts in physiology, i.e., 'animal electricity' ala (Galvani, and discoveries in higher mathematics and science that would lead to the Riemann mathematical lectures in 1854, James Clerk Maxwell's 'Electromagnetic Relationships' in 1865, and eventually to Albert Einstein's Special Relativity Theory (1905), and along the same path of thought and imagination to great works in technical fiction and even art, e.g, the Cubist movement begun around 1905 and exampled by the painters, Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso, Fernand Leger and Paul Cezanne.

Mary Shelley's intellectual world generated fictional works that expressed the excitement of new science which expanded the boundaries of human ingenuity and imagination. This new territory of the imagination based on scientific discovery led to the 1865 rendering of nascent quantum mechanical tenets of Uncertainy and other quantum principles in the fantasy worlds authored by Oxford mathematics professor (1855-81), Charles Dodgson (nome-de-plume, Lewis Carroll), notably his 'Alice in Wonderland' (1865) and 'Through the Looking Glass' (1871). And also in the works of Jules Verne, aka 'The Father of Science Fiction'- '20 Thousand Leagues Under the Sea' (1870) and   'Around the World in 80 Days' (1873); in the breakthrough science fiction works of HG Wells (biologist) -  'The Time Machine' (1895), 'The War of the Worlds' (1898) a truly out-of-this-world vision of non-earth (extraterrestrial life forms) and 'The Island of Dr Moreau' (1896) which must be placed as the inheritor of Mary Shelly's earlier 'Frankenstein'of 1818. 

Although Mary Shelley was not a scientist nor formally educated, she was home-schooled by very well educated and sophisticated parents. And her parents' home was an important intellectual scene of the very important 'Salon' phenomenon of 17th and 18th century Europe.  In the scene, Mary was  'taken up' as a teen age girl by the famous poet Percy Shelly and was introduced and immersed into the company of leading figures of 'forward' thinking in Europe, including the mentoring 'attention' from the poet and intellectual, George Gordon Lord Byron.  In this company, on an idyllic Swiss lake vacation, Mary Shelley shyly accepted a 'dare' to write a story about some important or interesting theme of the day.  Venturing forth from in this game, Mary wrote 'Frankenstein: or the Modern Prometheus' (1818). 'Frankenstein' put into narrative words the questions raised but not clearly stated from the serious scientific thinking of the time about the nature of the soul and life, and following on from there, race and species which in 1839 surfaced through the  biology field work of Charles Darwin, 'The Voyage of the Beagle', and  Darwin's later great breakthrough,'The Origin of the Species' (1859).

Despite Mary Shelley's lack of formal education, especially technical,  Mary's 'Frankenstein'  was at the leading edge of the wave of emotion among Europe's salon intellectuals who pondered the place (and meaning) of humanity in the midst of rapidly advancing 'new science'. A principal focus of those salon debates was, 'what are the biological and/or yet undiscovered principles of life and especially the soul'?

Following from her immersion in the leading salon discussions of her time, Mary Shelly explored what might be the consequences of mankind's 'tampering' with the sacredness of life and soul. In this context, Dr Frankenstein's creation is much more than a 'put-together monster' but a representation of  humanity itself, stumbling along blindly and naively into new realms not completely understood and loaded with potential risks and dangers.

Of great 'prescience' in 'Frankenstein' is how Mary Shelley writes about the monster's musings (and laments) about his physiological incompleteness despite his self-awareness, his worries about who could love him, his search for love and his thoughts about what to do with himself. These are concepts of man-made intelligence that Mary Shelley rendered into words in 1818 but would not be addressed seriously until the 1940's mathematical work of Alan Turing's 'Turing Test', an algorithmic method of determining whether an artificial intelligence is self-aware, i.e., sentient. Interestingly, in the context of this discussion, Alan Turing turned his mathematical prowess into developing a theory for the chemical basis of morphogenesis.

More modern examples of Mary Shelley's legacy of exploring the meaning of life and soul would include Philip K Dick's, 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep' (1962) (also made into the film hit, 'Blade Runner'  (1982), and  Ursula Le Guinn's ('The Left Hand of Darkness' (1969), Samuel Delaney's 'Babel-17' (1966)  and Walter Moseley's 'Blue Light' (1998) and 'Futureland: Nine Stories of an Imminent World' (2001).

Mary Shelley's inquiring spirit lives on  today. Modern (current, 2015) science is the most recent chapter of her legacy (and of her contemporary fantasy authors, e.g.,Wells, Verne, et al) of  imagination- become-real, e.g., organ transplants, genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), and the looming 'trans-human singularity' ( Neal Stephenson, Ray Kurzweil, Jody Turner, Vladimir Mayakovsky, et al).