Comment:

Can pheromone trails create a gestalt hivemind, like neurons in a brain? Can geometric data, interpreted by an AI, communicate in a language, like a person in a room?

Does Lee/Terra truly know nothing, and can they, from that starting position, deduce Zoa's personhood? Can Zoa/Zadok the fake person, constrained by laws and emblazoned with a Hebrew letter that gives it life, accept an organism's gift of love?

How real are my characters, to you? Do they live in the future of our world, in Canada or in America?

How real are you, to them? Do you live in the past of their world, in Athens or in Jerusalem?

I'm writing this comment file (in the past) on my 44th birthday, and 4 is an important number, doubly so if it is reflected. Protostomia and Deuterostomia are both constructed by DNA to be bilaterially symmetrical and able to survive. Technology and Fiction are both constructed by minds to be beautiful and useful. Be a bug, be a mammal, be a machine, be a myth, it's all the same in the end. The four humours aren't real science, but magic is important too, and sometimes you have to accept something that isn't true to be able to move forward. Faith is not required, only accord.

It's my birthday today, and I love all of you.

        - Mason "Tailsteak" Ross Williams; Warrior Poet, Philosopher King.

Transcript:

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0418– 2167/07/07/12:23 - Lee Caldavera's apartment, bedroom
LC: See, this is what I’m talking about! The ability to adapt to your environment, to shift your responses and methodologies! Is that not an indication of human-level intelligence?
Doc: Ah, damnit, I thought we’d successfully steered you off of that topic.
LC: Not this time!
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Zoa: Lee, machines have been able to adapt to stimuli and their environment since the invention of the automatic transmission.
Zoa: Also… like… bugs can do it.
LC: Trucks and bugs can’t adapt to talk about Gu Gu JaxxonFive.
Zoa: They could if you translated it into road slopes and pheromone trails, Chinese room style.
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LC: “Chinese room”?
Zoa: It’s an old thought experiment. Think of it like a kind of programming.
Doc: Lee, neither intelligence nor adaptability define personhood. You wouldn’t say that someone is no longer a person if they aren’t sufficiently intelligent or adaptable. There are plenty of clearly non-sapient devices that can work through complex logic problems or adapt to, say, the vacuum of space in ways that humans can’t.
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LC: So what is the official definition of “personhood”, then?
Doc: A human being.
Zoa: Chineseness optional.
Zoa: Now that that’s settled, who wants to watch some more cartoons?
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