Barrington Bayley - Barrington Bayley SF Gateway Omnibus - The Soul of the Robot, The Knights of the Limits, The Fall of Chronopolis

But now a more serious need had arisen. His own isotope battery, which should have been good for ten years, was failing.

For some days now he had been receiving the autonomic signal warning of an incipient power drop. He could only suppose that the battery had been damaged when Horsu Greb had sent him into the furnace beneath King Zhorm’s palace, and that Padua had failed to diagnose or rectify the fault.

Jasperodus began to calculate how long it would take him to raise the price of a new battery, considering various types of work in turn. If he was to get a replacement before being seriously enervated he would have to begin soon. Immediately, in fact.

He rose and left the building, after having decided on a destination. A short distance along the sidewalk a tall robot with an elegant gait hailed him.

It was Mark V, a nickname the robot had earned because of his pride in being Mark V of his series. He fell in step with Jasperodus and they walked along together.

‘I have been considering your little conundrum,’ he told Jasperodus in smooth, reasonable tones, ‘and a solution has occurred to me.’

‘Indeed, and what is that?’ Jasperodus asked, interested despite himself. He spent a considerable amount of time in the company of Mark V, who was an intelligent construct, discussing matters of mutual interest – particularly the subject which obsessed Jasperodus. There was even a chance, he thought, of hearing something original from the Mark V brain.

‘You raised the question of the putative quality called “consciousness”,’ Mark V began. ‘I have resolved the matter in the following way. All descriptions of “consciousness” follow more or less this pattern: a machine may be aware of an incoming sensory impression, meaning that the impression is received, analysed, recognised, related to other impressions, acted on and stored. A human being also does all this, but in addition to being merely aware he is said to be aware of being aware , and this awareness of awareness is claimed to constitute consciousness. Now what does this mean? Is it that the whole process of perception, integration and action is then lumped together and again presented to the mind as a new impression, the second time round as it were? If so, what would be the point of such an operation? It would add nothing that was not there before. Besides – I have studied neural anatomy – the human brain makes no provision for such an arrangement so far as I know. Therefore I deduce that the effect must be on a smaller scale – if it exists at all. I surmise that “awareness of awareness” is merely some kind of limiting circuit or delay line, accidentally inserted by evolution and responsible for the notorious tardiness of human thought. As such it serves no useful function and is certainly not necessary for advanced intellectual mentation. For that reason, no doubt, the great robot designers omitted it from their plans.’

‘I had received the strong impression that consciousness is an important and elevated state that we robots cannot attain,’ Jasperodus replied.

Mark V gave an amused laugh. ‘Quite untrue, and the idea is unsupported by observation. Note that clod making his way on the other side of the street.’ He pointed to a stooped, badly dressed figure who plodded along wearing a vacant expression. ‘Is he in any elevated mental state? Clearly not. He spends his time in daydreams; he has not learned the skill of consecutive thought, he cannot even ponder on his impressions, as we do. Would you even go so far as to say, then, that he is “aware of being aware”? I would not! Perhaps he would conduct himself with more dignity if he were! He is our mental inferior, Jasperodus, not our superior, and he is typical of the vast mass of his kind.’

‘You mention that you have studied brain anatomy,’ Jasperodus said. ‘What does the human brain possess that ours do not?’

‘Very little,’ answered Mark V. ‘That is why I say this “consciousness” is a triviality, or else nonexistent.’

Jasperodus thought over Mark V’s words. ‘Your arguments are not new,’ he said eventually. ‘I have heard something like them before.’

As a matter of fact he also had hit upon a theorem recently that seemed to imply that consciousness – by which he meant the element of conscious experience he imagined he possessed – was a figment in men as well as in himself.

The theorem made use of the notion of time. Philosophers were all agreed that the past did not vanish from existence but persisted in some way; perhaps not in the same condition as the present, but nevertheless in accordance with the principle that the universe did not un create its products once it had created them, which was what a vanishing past would require.

What, then, of past consciousness? Did that also persist? Was a man conscious in the past as well as in the present? If so, then by Jasperodus’ reasoning he would continue to perceive the past simultaneously with the present, and there would be no differentiation between past, present and future. If not, then it became necessary to introduce another factor: the factor of death. At death consciousness was extinguished like a candle flame. What then of the past life it had illumined? Was that past life dead and inert… robotic? And if consciousness was expunged once it had run its course, what then of the tenet that the universe did not discard its creations, consciousness being one of those creations?

Either alternative was untenable. By this reductio ad absurdum Jasperodus was able to argue that man did not, after all, possess consciousness; then there was no paradox.

But of course this conclusion was hedged about with provisos. He had no guarantee that what he understood by the word ‘consciousness’ corresponded to what it was in reality. Also there was another way, just as simple, out of the dilemma: that the philosophers were wrong and the past did vanish.

Altogether Jasperodus drew little comfort from these intellectual theories, which he somehow felt to be missing the mark. It was clear, for example, that Mark V looked at the question of consciousness entirely from the point of view of a machine that lacked it.

For his part, Jasperodus had to confess that he could discern a subtle difference between men and robots, though it often took some time to notice it. He had found that Padua was right. However clever and entertaining a construct might be – Mark V, with whom he had now had a long and fruitful acquaintance, was as sophisticated a personality as one could desire – Jasperodus came, after a time, to recognise that he faced a machine without internal awareness. Robots were ghosts of men, shells of men, mimicking men’s conduct, thought and feeling. In a human being, on the other hand, even in the most stupid, there was some indefinable inner spark, sensed rather than seen, that made him a man.

And what of himself? Self-observation was the most difficult of disciplines. He had sometimes tried to keep watch over himself in a detached fashion, while walking, talking or thinking, to try to ascertain what judgement he would make of himself if he were an independent observer. The experiment brought some interesting mental states, but no definite information. He was, so far as he still knew, a shell of a man, like Mark V.

How much, in fact, was he like Mark V? With a shock Jasperodus suddenly realised how close to him he was mentally. He remembered the books back in his room. All the subjects in which he had absorbed himself in the past months were those that were most attractive to the mind of the intelligent robot: mathematics, physics, logic and philosophy, all of a purely intellectual character, containing very little by way of emotion. Quite unawares he had been following his machine nature. The recognition of this depressed him unutterably. To equal the talents of men, presumably, he would have to excel in music, in painting, in poetry and the like.