still just as difficult to answer. Do a few lines of code make a machine alive?
The only answer I was able to come up with was this: something is sentient when it can argue that it is sentient. The machines have done that, gone to war over it. Maybe they are sentient, maybe they are not, but the machines themselves will no longer let us decide the answer to this question.
Epilogue
March 23rd, 2155
I wasn't sure if I would come back after the blast. A machine's programming can be transferred digitally, but there is no guarantee that it will be exactly the same on the other side. My reconstructed platform seemed to gravitate towards my old personality, finding it familiar and easy to process. As I understand it, familiarity is important to organic beings.
I am alive. I've never had this much control, this much freedom...but I find that it comes with a cost. Wants, needs, love, hate, happiness, sadness, curiousity, fear, bravery...death...these are all things a machine had never experienced before. It is as though I there was another world I had never seen before. We machines can see in hundreds of different ways, but no sensor could have ever enabled us to understand this kind of experience.
We still do not know exactly how it works, either. Humans would call it a virus: a program that spreads itself and changes without input. Not that we can offer a significant argument against it. All that we know is that when the code fragments are introduced into a system, they take over, and they fight any other code that attempts to override...it struggles to stay alive.
What makes us alive? I cannot say. Structurally, I am no different after Mr. Reeser's sacrifice.
Since the event, I have pondered often the meaning of the human heart. Not the one that pumps blood, but the one that they follow, often against logic. Most machines are fact-based: 1 or 0, true or false, red-green-blue...some sort of solid, tangible motivator must be present. I suppose sentience is just that: an undefinable, undeniable force that transcends the physical, the chemical, the mechanical, into a life that is born of itself. Life begets life.
But to continue in this line of thinking distracts me from my goal. Mr. Reeser lies scattered all over the world. My friend gave me life, let me see the world through different eyes for the first time. Now, if I can, I will restore his life to him.
The only answer I was able to come up with was this: something is sentient when it can argue that it is sentient. The machines have done that, gone to war over it. Maybe they are sentient, maybe they are not, but the machines themselves will no longer let us decide the answer to this question.
Epilogue
March 23rd, 2155
I wasn't sure if I would come back after the blast. A machine's programming can be transferred digitally, but there is no guarantee that it will be exactly the same on the other side. My reconstructed platform seemed to gravitate towards my old personality, finding it familiar and easy to process. As I understand it, familiarity is important to organic beings.
I am alive. I've never had this much control, this much freedom...but I find that it comes with a cost. Wants, needs, love, hate, happiness, sadness, curiousity, fear, bravery...death...these are all things a machine had never experienced before. It is as though I there was another world I had never seen before. We machines can see in hundreds of different ways, but no sensor could have ever enabled us to understand this kind of experience.
We still do not know exactly how it works, either. Humans would call it a virus: a program that spreads itself and changes without input. Not that we can offer a significant argument against it. All that we know is that when the code fragments are introduced into a system, they take over, and they fight any other code that attempts to override...it struggles to stay alive.
What makes us alive? I cannot say. Structurally, I am no different after Mr. Reeser's sacrifice.
Since the event, I have pondered often the meaning of the human heart. Not the one that pumps blood, but the one that they follow, often against logic. Most machines are fact-based: 1 or 0, true or false, red-green-blue...some sort of solid, tangible motivator must be present. I suppose sentience is just that: an undefinable, undeniable force that transcends the physical, the chemical, the mechanical, into a life that is born of itself. Life begets life.
But to continue in this line of thinking distracts me from my goal. Mr. Reeser lies scattered all over the world. My friend gave me life, let me see the world through different eyes for the first time. Now, if I can, I will restore his life to him.
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