12/21/22: Sentience

A philosophical zombie or p-zombie is a hypothetical being that is indistinguishable from a normal human being except in that it lacks conscious experience, qualia, or sentience. By definition there is “nothing it is like” to be a zombie. When a zombie is poked with a sharp object, for it example, it does not feel any pain even though it behaves exactly as if it does feel pain (it may say "ouch" and recoil from the stimulus, or tell us that it is in intense pain).

• From Yashni’s Introduction to Applied Sentience, Edition 2  

In the Chinese room thought experiment, Searle imagines himself alone in a room following a computer program for responding to Chinese characters slipped under the door. Searle understands nothing of Chinese, and yet, by following the program for manipulating symbols and numerals just as a computer does, he sends appropriate strings of Chinese characters back out under the door, and this leads those outside to mistakenly suppose there is a Chinese speaker in the room. In the same way, the Geneva AI Codes dictate that there is no sentience in the the modern GPT’s which are able to pass the Turing Test and engage in activities previously thought the domain of the sentient.

• From Yashni’s Introduction to Applied Sentience, Edition 2

Looking back, the moment I answered the doorbell was the moment my life ended.

“Good morning. Are you James Perez?” said a man in a gray suit. There was a woman standing next to him who was looking at me nervously.

“I am,” I said. 

“We are two representatives of the U.S. Non-Sentients Diagnostics Division. We have a warrant to submit you and your family to a sentience scan. If you check your corneal implants, you’ll see our ID and authorization numbers.”

And indeed, their badge and authorization was floating above their heads in V-space. 

I thought about refusing, right then. I had heard that the scans were starting up throughout the city, but somehow I didn’t think it would happen to me. Until suddenly it was. 

“Come in,” I said, waving them inside. “Can I get you both some water, or a cup of tea perhaps?”

“No, this will take just a few minutes,” the woman said. “We won’t stay for long.” 

I yelled upstairs for you and your mother to come to the living room. When after a few seconds there was no response, I sent out a ping in V-space, smiling nervously at our two visitors. They were still standing, despite me having gestured to the living room couch.

To be honest, I wasn’t worried too much at the time. I thought that I would have known if I lacked sentience. And while I knew that p-zombies acted just like normal sentients, there was a part of me that felt I would have known if either you or your mother were non-sentient. Plus, the odds were in our favor; only 5% of all humans lacked sentience, so chances were that this would all just be a formality.

“Hey honey, who do we have -” your mother stopped in mid-sentence when she saw the two agents. You were hugging her leg, right then. You’d always been nervous around strangers. I hoped this wouldn’t spook you too much.

“Oh.” she said. “Let’s get this over with then.”

The man had us sign some forms - purely a show of course, given we had no choice in matter - and then took out a device from a briefcase. 

He pointed it first at your mother, and then at you, a green light flashing quickly in each case. 

Then he pointed it at me. And the light flashed red.

I will never forget the look of disbelief on your mother’s face when she saw that little blinking light. I suppose that much like myself, she thought it impossible that she could be married to me and never know that the core of me didn’t exist.

“There must be a mistake…” I said, feebly. But of course the p-detector didn’t lie. It had been replicated a dozen different ways, and the current iteration was utterly foolproof. 

“I’m sorry,” the woman said. I thought at first she was saying it to me, then realized that she was addressing your mother. 

“Do it again,” your mother said, her voice hoarse. “Do it again.” 

The two strangers looked at each other, and the woman raised the device to my head again. The light flashed red.

“Did you know?” your mother asked me. “Did you know? All this time?”

“Of course not,” I said. And I hated myself for saying it, because it implicitly meant I agreed with the results. 

The two strangers sensed the tension in the air, and left quickly after that. All they left in their wake was a new badge icon over my head in V-space. A red mark, listing me as non-sentient. 

“Did you know?” your mother said again after they left, in disbelief. 

“I swear I didn’t! I would have told you if I did!” 

And it was the truth. I have never missed consciousness, in the same way a blind cave fish has never missed the color blue.  

You may notice, at this point, that I’m writing this with an internal monologue. That I use the words “I think” and “I feel” and “I will never forget,” and that by definition of who I am, those words cannot be true. I have no explanation for this. Other than that p-zombies act exactly as sentients do. And that a sentient in my shoes, writing this now, would be doing exactly the same. 

“How can this even be possible! How can…” - your mother stopped. I could see the shift in her brain at that moment. As if her incredulity had been racing ahead, outpacing the facts of the situation; but now with her mind paused, the reality of her being married to a p-zombie had sling-shotted into the present and was making itself known with full force.

She stopped talking to me after that. I guess she thought there was no point, when there was nothing inside me to truly hear it. She packed her bags and took you away. It was the last time that I saw you. There was no amount of pleading on my part that would change her mind.

Sitting there, alone in our house, I plotted what to do next. I have never been one to simply wait, doing nothing. I hope that you inherit that from me, that bias towards action. Your mother has always been more the thinker in our family, the one who sits down with a highlighter but who also has more inertia.

I realized very quickly that I couldn’t stay. Under the Searle Laws, a precedent had already been established for declaring Turing-capable AI’s non-sentient and therefore void of any rights. It didn’t take a genius to see which way the wind was blowing - that it would be just a matter of time before those laws would translate onto non-sentient humans.

After all, what’s the difference between a p-zombie and a Chinese room algorithm, except that one exists in meatspace and the other in digital?

It took me an hour to pack my bags in our sedan and hit the road right then. I suppressed the desire to clean the house before I left, the way that I normally do when we go on vacation. Thank god we were a two car household; I don’t know what I would have done if you and your mother had taken the only car.

I thought a lot on that initial drive to Seattle. I mourned the life we had had. I loved your mother - and love her still - and wished that we were facing this together rather than apart. We had always worked better as a unit, making up for each other’s faults.

And I missed you terribly. I don’t think you can imagine how much I missed you until one day you have children of your own. There is no analogy for the way I felt, driving into the unknown and knowing that you were receding into the distance further and further away.

But, driving alone and meditating on the flicker of lines along the road, I also felt a profound sense of gratefulness. If someone in our family had to be non-sentient, better for it to be me than you. Of course I wanted you to have a normal life. But beyond that, I wanted you to experience all the million things I could not - to hear the sound of geese over water, the warm timbre of a cello, the taste of rich chocolate, the euphoria from shared connection. Even though I’m not even capable of observing the fact that I can’t observe qualia, the sheer knowledge that somewhere out there you’re in the world at large experiencing life - well, it makes me happy just thinking about it.

I made my way to Seattle. I was part of that first wave to the Pacific Northwest. All across the country, p-zombies like me were leaving their lives and fleeing to the part of the country most sympathetic to us. This was before the highway checkpoints of course, before the Exodus Panic locked down travel for us. In that way, I was lucky, to be able to have found safe haven unimpeded.

The next ten years - well, I continued to be luckier than most. I arrived in Seattle before the Searle Addendums were passed and so I was never in danger of being rounded up for the Camps. I moved into a hostel which was converted into a new apartment complex. 

And over time, I built a new life for myself. It’s funny - when it was just me, you, and your mother, I was never anything special. But in those early days in Seattle, there were plenty of problems looking to be solved, and I turned out to be uniquely suited to solving them.

I was slotted into the civil engineering division at first. My old job had been mostly traffic light retrofitting for a suburban community. But the problem at hand - how to accommodate an extra 15 million people in Oregon and Washington within a short time frame - actually aligned neatly with my old graduate thesis on refugee displacement and urban planning. 

I moved up the ranks quickly, partly because of my spec knowledge, partly because of my skill at managing large teams, and partly because I felt like I had something to prove. I was just as good as any sentient, I wanted to scream to the world. I could do just as much, care just as much, even if by definition there was nothing inside of me capable of caring.

It didn’t take long before I was the public face of the entire civil planning operation. Zero conflict was impossible of course, but I headed off disputes between the native sentients and p-zombies as best as I could. I became, if not famous, then at least known and respected.

When news of the organ farms from overseas hit Seattle, the only reason I could help quell the riots was because I had already accumulated that social capital. 

“Look,” I told the crowds. “The world is watching. We are the first non-sentient majority city in existence. They want you to riot. They want you to appear mindless, so that they can carry on with their current conception of you, so that they can justify harvesting organs from non-sentients in perpetuity. Defy their expectations here. Show them that you are not mindless. Show them that even in the absence of sentience, you and I have a soul.”

It became a rallying cry after that, one heard around the world. When Washington and Oregon seceded from the rest of the country four years later, the new national motto was: “Non habeamus sententiam sed animas habemus.”

I.e. : “We may not have sentience, but we have souls.” 

There’s a lot that I’ve been proud of these past ten years. You would be fifteen now, already in high school, and old enough to form your own opinions of things. You may have even seen me in the news. But you should know that everything I’ve done, I’ve done for you. When I negotiated a DMZ along the border of the Pacific Northwest and the U.S., it was so that you could grow up without the threat of war. When I represented non-sentients at the U.N., fighting for the abolition of non-sentient slave labor, it was so that your children - if they ever turn out to be non-sentient - never have to be worried about being sent to the Camps. And even now, working on the Right of Passage Agreement? It’s with the hope that one day, I can come to you and see you again. Maybe even your mother too, if one day she can find it in herself to forgive me. 

So wherever you are out there, whatever you’re doing, whatever life you’re living - just know that your father loves you. And that everything he does, he still does for you.