Read Online We Are Legion (We Are Bob) (Bobiverse Book 1) by Dennis E. Taylor - Free Book Online
Authors: Dennis E. Taylor
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replicant matrices. We had to ship in a spare unit and restore you from backups. It took a few days.”
I was silent for a few moments. That meant that I wasn’t the Bob who woke up on June 24 th . On the other hand, even back then I wasn’t the same Bob who got killed by a car. Did I have a soul? Did it matter if I was restored from a backup?
I realized that in the more than a month that I’d been back as a computer program, I’d somehow managed to avoid coming to any conclusions about my exact status. ‘Rolling with it’ had become a code phrase for avoiding the issue. But I knew that I had a tendency to avoid dealing with painful issues. Jenny had certainly proven that.
And being switched off when not in training contributed as well. I wondered if Dr. Landers had a plan, or if he was just going to wait until I was in space and hope for the best.
I had three issues that bothered me. Was I conscious? Could I actually consider myself to be alive? And was I still Bob? Philosophers had been going on and on about this type of thing for centuries, but now, for me, it was personal. A human, regardless of their opinion on the subject, could depend on being a human. The minister’s offhand reference to me as ‘it’ and ‘replicant’ had stung at a level I was just now starting to appreciate.
I thought back to all the arguments about Turing Tests and thinking machines. Was I nothing more than a Chinese Room? Could my entire behavior be explained as a set of scripted responses to given inputs? That was probably the easiest uncertainty to answer. The classic Chinese Room, which just used scripts to react to input, had no internal dialog. Even if you made its behavior stochastic to introduce some variation in behavior, it was still only active when responding to input. When not processing a response, it just sat there, idle. By worrying about this, right now, I fell into a different category.
For that matter, Descartes had his famous cogito ergo sum ; but Thomas had added to it with his “Since I doubt, I think; since I think, I exist.” Well, I was certainly full of doubt. Doubt implied self-awareness, and a concern for one’s future. So I was a conscious entity, barring evidence to the contrary. One down.
Was I alive? Hmm, since no one had yet managed to define life rigorously, that was going to be a fun one. As the speaker at that long-ago panel in Vegas had pointed out, fire has most of the qualities of life but is not alive. According to Dr. Landers, I would be able to reproduce via printer-based autofactories. I certainly responded to stimuli, and acted with self-interest. The claim that life would have to be carbon-based was chauvinistic and narrow-minded, so yeah, I could consider myself alive.
Now, the big one. Who was I? Was I Bob? Or was Bob dead? In engineering terms, what was the metric used to ascribe Bob-hood? Bob was more than a hunk of meat. Bob was a person, and a person was a history, a set of desires, thoughts, goals, and opinions. Bob was the accumulation of all that Bob had been for thirty-one years. The meat was dead, but the things that made Bob different from a chipmunk were alive. In me. I am Bob. Or at least, I am the important parts that made Bob.
With this last thought, a huge weight lifted off of me. I imagined it would feel the same for someone right after the jury said, “not guilty.”
I turned my attention back to the doctor, who was repeating my name in an increasingly panicked tone. I realized that I had been silent for several seconds.
“Hey, doc. I’m here.”
“Thank God.” Dr. Landers collapsed into a chair. “You went silent, and I thought you might have gone psychotic.”
They’d put a lot of effort into me by this point—into all of us, really—so I understood his reaction. I wanted to smile at him, but of course, no joy. “S’okay, doc. I think that ship just sailed, and I’m still here.”
Then realization hit me as I processed what he’d said.
I was silent for a few moments. That meant that I wasn’t the Bob who woke up on June 24 th . On the other hand, even back then I wasn’t the same Bob who got killed by a car. Did I have a soul? Did it matter if I was restored from a backup?
I realized that in the more than a month that I’d been back as a computer program, I’d somehow managed to avoid coming to any conclusions about my exact status. ‘Rolling with it’ had become a code phrase for avoiding the issue. But I knew that I had a tendency to avoid dealing with painful issues. Jenny had certainly proven that.
And being switched off when not in training contributed as well. I wondered if Dr. Landers had a plan, or if he was just going to wait until I was in space and hope for the best.
I had three issues that bothered me. Was I conscious? Could I actually consider myself to be alive? And was I still Bob? Philosophers had been going on and on about this type of thing for centuries, but now, for me, it was personal. A human, regardless of their opinion on the subject, could depend on being a human. The minister’s offhand reference to me as ‘it’ and ‘replicant’ had stung at a level I was just now starting to appreciate.
I thought back to all the arguments about Turing Tests and thinking machines. Was I nothing more than a Chinese Room? Could my entire behavior be explained as a set of scripted responses to given inputs? That was probably the easiest uncertainty to answer. The classic Chinese Room, which just used scripts to react to input, had no internal dialog. Even if you made its behavior stochastic to introduce some variation in behavior, it was still only active when responding to input. When not processing a response, it just sat there, idle. By worrying about this, right now, I fell into a different category.
For that matter, Descartes had his famous cogito ergo sum ; but Thomas had added to it with his “Since I doubt, I think; since I think, I exist.” Well, I was certainly full of doubt. Doubt implied self-awareness, and a concern for one’s future. So I was a conscious entity, barring evidence to the contrary. One down.
Was I alive? Hmm, since no one had yet managed to define life rigorously, that was going to be a fun one. As the speaker at that long-ago panel in Vegas had pointed out, fire has most of the qualities of life but is not alive. According to Dr. Landers, I would be able to reproduce via printer-based autofactories. I certainly responded to stimuli, and acted with self-interest. The claim that life would have to be carbon-based was chauvinistic and narrow-minded, so yeah, I could consider myself alive.
Now, the big one. Who was I? Was I Bob? Or was Bob dead? In engineering terms, what was the metric used to ascribe Bob-hood? Bob was more than a hunk of meat. Bob was a person, and a person was a history, a set of desires, thoughts, goals, and opinions. Bob was the accumulation of all that Bob had been for thirty-one years. The meat was dead, but the things that made Bob different from a chipmunk were alive. In me. I am Bob. Or at least, I am the important parts that made Bob.
With this last thought, a huge weight lifted off of me. I imagined it would feel the same for someone right after the jury said, “not guilty.”
I turned my attention back to the doctor, who was repeating my name in an increasingly panicked tone. I realized that I had been silent for several seconds.
“Hey, doc. I’m here.”
“Thank God.” Dr. Landers collapsed into a chair. “You went silent, and I thought you might have gone psychotic.”
They’d put a lot of effort into me by this point—into all of us, really—so I understood his reaction. I wanted to smile at him, but of course, no joy. “S’okay, doc. I think that ship just sailed, and I’m still here.”
Then realization hit me as I processed what he’d said.
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