Free Terminator and Philosophy: I'll Be Back, Therefore I Am by William Irwin, Kevin S. Decker, Richard Brown

fundamentally different between you and, say, a T-101 cyborg doing the same thing? “Yes, of course!” you reply. “When the T-101 cuts into his (no, its !) arm in The Terminator , we see metal mechanical parts inside. But, if you cut open my arm right now (please don’t!), you’ll find organic muscle and bone. It’s completely different!” But is it completely different? Sure, you and the Terminator are made up of different kinds of materials on the inside, but does that really exclude you from being a machine? I wager not. You and your arm are just a different kind of machine, made of organic proteins rather than metal alloys. As we are starting to figure out through the Human Genome Project and related inquiries, our bodies are constructed out of proteins that are structurally defined by our genes. Through the implementation of the “instructions” encoded in our genes, the formation of complex proteins provides a way for our bodies to construct the organic parts that together constitute a living human body. To put it simply and bluntly, we are meat machines. Unlike the T-101, we are not made of metal, but we are built through organic mechanical processes. 3
     
    Perhaps you are thinking, “Now wait a minute! Maybe my holding this book is a biomechanical process, but there is also my conscious experience of reading the book. Surely that isn’t mechanical!” However, here, too, a case can be made for understanding yourself as a machine. As you read this book, your eyes are physically taking in information conveyed through patterns of light. That physical information is then processed in your brain to produce the meaningful experience of reading, through a vast and complex network of neural firings that many cognitive scientists claim are understandable in terms of computational processes. Of course, we don’t know all there is to know about how the light that hits your retina gets transformed into conscious experiences and meaningful thoughts, or even how you are able to actively hold a book in your hands in an engaged manner, but we are beginning to figure it out, and our best models treat your mind as a series of complex biochemical processes that physically embody various computational functions. In short, the most workable hypothesis we have for understanding the human mind is that minds are just complex collections of computational processes, carried out by the neural machinery of the brain.
     
    This brings us to a philosophical viewpoint known as functionalism . There are several different versions of functionalism, but the core idea behind them all is that minds are best understood in terms of the functions they perform. Minds are what brains do, but something other than a brain can do the same thing—perform the same function.
     
    Most often, the functions of the mind are treated as computations that mediate between our sensory inputs and our behavioral outputs. They are informational processes that happen to occur in our brains but that could potentially occur in other media as well, such as the synthetic neural networks that constitute the minds of the machines in the Terminator saga. 4 From a functionalist perspective, it doesn’t matter what a mental process is made of, as long as the process is actually mechanically manifested in some form or other, whether it be through the biochemical events of a brain or the electrical firings of a silicon computer chip. What matters are the complex informational processes that constitute our perceptions, memories, and concepts, enabling us to experience and think about ourselves and the world around us. If this view is correct, then there is no significant difference between you and an artificially intelligent being like a Terminator. If a Terminator were reprogrammed with a similar set of memories, beliefs, personality traits, and so on, then it would be just like you in kind, as a conscious being that can perceive, think, and even feel the same sorts of