When I read Imposter it didn’t make me wonder about how complex computers can become or not, but seemed like it was a story that focused more on memory (like We Can Remember It For You Wholesale). So far in the stories that we’ve read it has questioned reality and mainly our surroundings, but in this story the main character is not living in a false world that is out to harm or deceive him, but is in fact the complete opposite. Olham is in fact in the world that he believes but is instead his own enemy, and ironically an essential part of his existence is to deceive himself and keep himself from knowing who he truly is. This story is similar to the other Phillip K. Dick story A Scanner Darkly which deals with a man who has two separate lives and sets of memories and must “spy” on himself to know who he truly is in his other life. So far we have come to the conclusion that we cannot trust our surroundings but with stories such as these, we now cannot even trust ourselves for fear that we will always simply be deceiving ourselves. Therefore it would seem as if the only thing that we can believe is that we exist, which is the most basic law of philosophy.

As for the topic of artificial intelligence, it was interesting to read the argument made for and against the possibility of it. The characters make interesting points, saying that artificial intelligence is like a simulated hurricane and that if one was to be within the simulation the hurricane would be for all points and purposes “real”. Though it is essentially no more than a simulation of intelligence, it can still appear to be real (like the simulated hurricane) however this means that the idea of artificial intelligence relies on your interpretation of “reality”. Like the Matrix, artificial intelligence is only a “simulation”, however as we had decided in class, it is not real. However, before knowing that the world was simply a program when we first watched the movie, I’m sure that everyone assumed that the world being portrayed was reality. This means that Perhaps artificial intelligence is only artificial because we can knowingly compare it to actual human reasoning and intelligence.

Although there is the argument that even a simulation of intelligence is realistic enough to be actual intelligence. Actual intelligence is based upon several factors, knowledge, an ability to apply knowledge, information, reasoning, emotion, and most likely more that I’m forgetting. The point is that computers may be able to have reasoning (or at least the ability to compute statistics) along with these other factors, however it seems doubtful that computers can actually have human emotion. Not just imitate the physical reactions caused by joy in humans, but actually feel joy or sorrow or anger, or love because one may argue that it is only hormones and various chemicals within the brain that cause emotion and technically any emotion can actually be “created” within machines. It is too difficult for me to argue this point either way, seeing as how the creation of emotion has never been accomplished so the actual possibility of it is not for me to argue (I tried but ended up confusing myself).
I suppose we can never know if artificial intelligence is true or not, since we have established that we can never know anything beyond our own senses, therefore we can never feel emotions for a computer and no one beyond the computer can ever truly know if it can feel pleasure or pain. So after all of this I’ve determined that I cannot determine anything and will only end up where I began.