We Are Legion (We Are Bob)

I snapped back to consciousness. As usual, I did a systems check.

Wait, August 10th?

“Hey, doc, I seem to be missing a few days. Have you had me on ice for a week?”

Dr. Landers looked everywhere except at me. “Well, yes and no. Someone managed to sneak a small explosive into the computer room and take out the 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 24th. 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.