(urth) AI souls

[Roy C. Lackey]

Sidestepping the dubious notion that chems were "implanted" with the brain
scans of particular human beings, let us look at another example of
machine-based autonomous entities in Wolfe's work, one in which the author's
presumed conviction that non-biological "persons" do indeed have "souls"
comparable to those of human beings can, I think, be more clearly
demonstrated. I refer to Sidero and his kind.

Sidero's kind started off as glorified spacesuits. He speaks first in the
following exchange with Severian in Chapter VIII of URTH:
---------------------------------------
"You asked how we came to be. Do you know how your
own race came to be?"
      "Only that we were animals who lived in trees. That is
what the mystes say. Not the monkeys, since the monkeys
are there still. Perhaps something like the zoanthropes,
though smaller. The zoanthropes always make for the
mountains, I've noticed, and they climb trees in the high
jungle there. At any rate, these animals communicated
with one another, as even cattle do, and wolves, by certain
cries and motions. Eventually, through the will of the
Increate, it came to be that those who communicated best
survived while those who did so poorly perished."
      "Is there no more?"
      I shook my head. "When they communicated well
enough that they could be said to speak, they were men and
women. Such are we still. Our hands were made to cling to
branches, our eyes to see the next branch as we move from
tree to tree, our mouths to speak, and to chew fruit and
fledglings. So are they still. But what of your own kind?"
      "Much like yours. If the story is true, the mates wanted
shelter from the void, from destructive rays, the weapons
of hostiles, and other things. They built hard coverings for
themselves. They wanted to be stronger too, for war and
work on deck. Then they put the liquid you saw into us so
that our arms and legs would move as they wanted, but
with greater force. Into our genators, I ought to have said.
They needed to communicate, so they added talk circuits.
Then more circuits so we could do one thing as they did
another. Controllers so we could speak and act even when
they could not. Until at last we spoke in storage and acted
without a mate inside."
--------------------------------

This passage describes the evolutionary paths by which both man and android
reached their present states, and it was by the Increate's will that it was
so. At some point Sidero's kind became self-aware. In the case of both
"races", speech was the defining element, what made a man a man and an
android an android -- that and the ability to act autonomously.

If men have souls, according to the Bible, and if the men of the Bible were
such as we, and if the Bible exists by the will of the Increate, then Sidero
has a soul, so far as Wolfe is concerned.

Consider this: at one point Sidero expressed regret to Severian for certain
actions he had taken against Severian. His conscious bothered him. To
experience guilt is to have knowledge of a concept of right and wrong. Such
knowledge, and the ability to act in accordance with that knowledge, are the
criteria by which, according to Wolfe's chosen religion, the Increate judges
men. That judgement implies a reckoning of some kind, which doesn't
necessarily happen in life. That's where the notion of the soul comes in. No
matter how good or bad a man may be in the eyes of the Increate, when the
body dies, as it will eventually, it isn't over. It is the soul that
survives and must endure that reckoning, to be rewarded or punished by will
of the Increate.

Sidero didn't fear Severian or "punishment" by Tzadkiel for his actions; the
worst Tzadkiel could do was "kill" him in some way. He was worried about how
the Increate would judge him. There was nothing to worry about if he didn't
have a soul.

-Roy