Terminator and Philosophy: I'll Be Back, Therefore I Am Read Free Page A

He has the behavior down pat and can always match the right English input with an appropriate Austrian-accented output. Still, he has no idea what any of it means. He is doing it all, as we might say, in a purely mechanical manner.
     
    If the little Austrian can behave like the Terminator without understanding what he is doing, then there seems no reason to doubt that a machine could behave like the Terminator without understanding what it is doing. If the little Austrian doesn’t need to understand his dialogue to speak it, then surely a Terminator machine could also speak its dialogue without having any idea what it is saying. In fact, by following a program, it could do anything while thinking nothing at all.
     
    You might object that in the situation I described, it is the Austrian’s computer file with rules for matching English input to English output that is doing all the work and it is the computer file rather than the Austrian that understands English. The problem with this objection is that the role of the computer file could be played by a written book of instructions, and a written book of instructions just isn’t the sort of thing that can understand English. So Searle’s argument against thinking machines works: thinking behavior does not prove that real thinking is going on. 8 But if thinking doesn’t consist in producing the right behavior under the right circumstances, what could it consist in? What could still be missing?
     

“Skynet Becomes Self-Aware at 2:14 AM Eastern Time, August 29th.”
     
    I believe that a thinking being must have certain conscious experiences . If neither Skynet nor its robots are conscious, if they are as devoid of experiences and feelings as bricks are, then I can’t count them as thinking beings. Even if you disagree with me that experiences are required for true thought, you will probably agree at least that something that never has an experience of any kind cannot be a person . So what I want to know is whether the machines feel anything, or to put it another way, I want to know whether there is anything that it feels like to be a Terminator.
     
    Many claims are made in the Terminator movies about a Terminator’s experiences, and there is lot of evidence for this in the way the machines behave. “Cyborgs don’t feel pain. I do,” Reese tells Sarah in The Terminator , hoping that she doesn’t bite him again. Later, he says of the T-101, “It doesn’t feel pity or remorse or fear.” Things seem a little less clear-cut in T2 , however. “Does it hurt when you get shot?” young John Connor asks his T-101. “I sense injuries. The data could be called pain,” the Terminator replies. On the other hand, the Terminator says he is not afraid of dying, claiming that he doesn’t feel any emotion about it one way or the other. John is convinced that the machine can learn to understand feelings, including the desire to live and what it is to be hurt or afraid. Maybe he’s right. “I need a vacation,” confesses the T-101 after he loses an arm in battle with the T-1000. When it comes time to destroy himself in a vat of molten metal, the Terminator even seems to sympathize with John’s distress. “I’m sorry, John. I’m sorry,” he says, later adding, “I know now why you cry.” When John embraces the Terminator, the Terminator hugs him back, softly enough not to crush him.
     
    As for the T-1000, it, too, seems to have its share of emotions. How else can we explain the fact that when Sarah shoots it repeatedly with a shotgun, it looks up and slowly waves its finger at her? That’s gloating behavior, the sort of thing motivated in humans by a feeling of smug superiority. More dramatically yet, when the T-1000 is itself destroyed in the vat of molten metal, it bubbles with screaming faces as it melts. The faces seem to howl in pain and rage with mouths distorted to grotesque size by the intensity of emotion.
     
    In T3 , the latest T-101 shows emotional