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

things that you do.
     
    Why should we accept this functionalist understanding of ourselves? To help resolve questions like this, philosophers often resort to thought experiments, or hypothetical scenarios that can help clarify our understanding of, and commitment to, our various conceptions of the world. So here is a thought experiment to help us out, adapted from an idea proposed by the philosopher William Lycan. 5 Suppose you are one of John Connor’s compatriots in the future, and a human friend of yours, we’ll call her Henrietta, is in bad shape. She has some type of cancer that is destroying her body. But you, being an expert on the biomechanics of the T-101 and its relationship to human physiology, have a plan. You start replacing Henrietta’s various body parts with functional duplicates taken from your large stash of spare T-101 parts. First, you replace her legs, then her arms, then the vital organs of her torso. Henrietta continues to act her same old self, and thanks you for saving her life. But unfortunately the cancer still exists in her head and threatens to destroy her brain. So you take Henrietta to a mind-scanning expert and get him to scan her brain, decoding the vast number of intricate details encoded in her neurons. Then you perform a series of brain-to-computer-chip transplants, in which you replace each part of her brain with a synthetic, but functionally identical, duplicate. Throughout these transplants the same old Henrietta pulls through, with her memories, sense of humor, and anti-machine gumption intact. When Henrietta has finally been entirely replaced with Terminator parts, but still talks and acts just like she always has, how will you respond to her? Will you continue to treat her as a conscious, thinking, and feeling being, still deserving of your friendship and personal devotion? Is she still a person, with the same psychological features and moral status of ordinary flesh-based human beings? If you say no, then you are what Lycan calls a “human chauvinist,” a person who has a philosophically unjustified bias in favor of human biology and prejudice against nonhuman forms of consciousness. If Henrietta has continued to behave just as she always has, embodying the same functional processes encased in her old protein-based skinbag, then you ought to regard her as still fully present, as the same conscious Henrietta, even if she is now made of parts that once constituted an army of human-killing T-101s.
     
    Does it bother you to think of yourself and your friends as machines? It shouldn’t! Recognizing our mechanical nature does nothing to detract from our capabilities as human beings. If nothing else, consider the amazing feats achieved by machines in the Terminator films. For example, the T-101 cyborg has the ability to perceive and thoughtfully interact with things in its environment, as vividly demonstrated through the red-hued “Terminal Vision” first-person camera shots that periodically appear in the Terminator films. More significantly, the T-101 can also learn new things. In fact, after John and Sarah Connor flip a switch to enable “learning” on the T-101’s CPU, it appears that he can even learn to value human life and overcome his preprogrammed nature as an indiscriminate killing machine. Here, too, James Cameron’s director’s commentary on Terminator 2 is instructive. In describing what he sees as a key theme of the film, he says, “If a machine, a Terminator, can learn the value of life, . . . maybe we can, too.” In considering this possibility, being a machine may not be such a bad thing after all.
     

Machines and Human Nature: Why James Cameron Is a Cyborg
     
    Even if we ourselves are “biomechanicals,” we might still distance ourselves from the machines we produce as artifacts . That is, we typically think of ourselves as being the producers of the technology that is the product for achieving our various ends. Again, this is something we can