“If there can be love between a human and her pet, why can’t I have mine for my father?!”
“Because, my dear, your father is not real.”
As a person who’s intrigued by the conundrum behind the human cognition, I can’t help but envisage the many repercussions effected by the development in this field. Computational cognitive science, an area of scientific knowledge that attempts to replicate the human cognition in algorithmic form, is paving the way to the first digital mind. Mentally and spiritually, it is no more different than a man in the form of a dog or a cat. In effect, it is a real human. The only demarcation lies in the form which it takes. Yet the thing that intrigues me even more is the interaction between an artificial human and a real human. What happens when a human is emotionally attached to another human who was considered as a non-living object? The brief fictitious story below will serve to delineate my point clearly.
In a quiet neighborhood in a suburb, there lived a brilliant scientist together with his only daughter, a cheerful teenager. A serendipitous discovery led to his creation - a human mind replicating machine. In order to test it, he transcribed his mind into digital form. While the device was performing a long post-processing on his replicated mind, he received a call and went out of his home. He never came back to home ever since, for he had suddenly died in a mysterious accident. His daughter, knowing that she would never be able to see her father anymore, broke down into tears and turned into an eccentric introvert. One day, the daughter accidentally discovered the mind replicating machine along with her father’s replicated mind, which was stored in it. A sense of hope kindled in her as she attempted to bring her father’s mind back to life. The digital replica was identical to her father down to the minutest detail. It was, in effect, her father, but in a digital form. For the first time after her father’s death, she smiled. She was glad to be with her father again. Her resurrected father consciously knew that he was dead, and that he was residing in a machine. Yet there was not the slightest melancholy in his countenance, for he knew nothing was more important than being with his only daughter.
Such a wonderful time lasted for three years, when suddenly, the daughter found out that her real father was still alive. Yet, for that entire three years, she was deeply attached to her digital father and was bonded with him emotionally. There came the ironic feeling. She could not have both her fathers. She was forced to choose only one. Paradoxically, there had always been only one father (to emphasize the fact that the real father and the replicated father were totally the same), which was why she found it hard to decide. She had almost collapsed emotionally, yet her digital father was more than understanding. He was willing to delete himself away from her life. But she would not allow. To complicate matters even further, her real-life father, ever since that accident, had fallen into persistent vegetative state (alive, but no sign of brain activity). Metaphorically, his mind was in a state of emptiness, and what was left of him was only an empty shell. On one hand, she had a blood-and-flesh real father, but without cognitive abilities. On the other hand, she had a perfectly conscious father which was not corporeal. They were both her father. She could commit herself to only one, and who would it be?