JUST LIKE US

Just Like Us

Kyle Hinckley

Utah Valley University

JUST LIKE US

2
Just Like Us

In the heart of the Institute, a room the size of an amphitheater is dedicated to building
perfect machines. Pneumatic arms build them bone by bone, weave muscle fibers around them,
and dip the result in a vat of boiling tissue. What walks out of that room seems in every way to
be human, from their actions and reactions to their chemical and biological makeup. In fact, the
only difference between us and them is a small digital component which makes up part or all of
their minds. These are the synths of Fallout 4, a 2015 video game by Bethesda Softworks. The
game puts the player in the position of deciding the value of synth life, and eventually, how
society will treat them. We are posed a question: do synths deserve human rights?
Lets use a real world example of artificial intelligence to begin our deliberation. In 2011,
a question-answering computer system named Watson defeated reigning champions Ken
Jennings and Brad Rutter on the quiz show Jeopardy!. Watson had access to 200 million pages of
data, including the entire text of Wikipedia, but the striking thing about Watson was its ability to
deconstruct the oddly-phrased answers in the show and produce the needed questions. While
Watson has no sense of self, can we agree that Watson is a thinking machine?
Philosopher John Searle reacted to Watson's victory in an article in the Wall Street
Journal, citing his famous thought experiment The Chinese Room. It goes something like this:
A person is placed in a room with a massive number of reference books on Chinese symbols, a
master book with instructions on how to use the reference books, and pen, ink and paper.
Chinese inputs are fed into the room, and the person follows the master book to deconstruct the
inputs. They then follow the master book to generate responses from the reference books. If the

JUST LIKE US

responses are so well-phrased to be indistinguishable from the natural speakers of Chinese, can
we say that the room understands Chinese?
Searle claims that because the person in the room doesn't understand a word of Chinese,
and the books, pen, ink and paper can't be said to understand anything, the room does not
understand Chinese. His conclusion is the title of the article: Watson Doesn't Know It Won on
'Jeopardy!' (Searle).
If the aggregate sum of computer-database-program-input-output can never attain
understanding, the leap is often made that computers can never be conscious. What is
consciousness? Is it uniquely human? If so, what about us is so different?
The human brain seems to differ from the rest of the animal kingdom because of its
immensely complex neocortex. This outer shell of the human brain is a mere four millimeters
thick, but takes up about 80% of the brain's weight. The American neuroscientist Vernon
Mountcastle made two fantastic discoveries about the neocortex. In 1957, he showed that the
neocortex has a columnar organization (Mountcastle, Modality 408-34), and in 1978, he
observed its remarkably unvarying structure (Mountcastle, Mindful). This led him to hypothesize
that the neocortex is made up of the same mechanism, repeated over and over again.
Futurist Ray Kurzweil discusses these mechanisms in his book How to Create a Mind.
His theory, that these mechanisms are a kind of pattern-recognition module, explains how our
consciousness is derived from being able to recognize patterns, and patterns of patterns
(Kurzweil). While this theory is not universally accepted, it does get to the heart of the question
of consciousness: what is our brain, if not an organic computer?

JUST LIKE US

In contrast to Searle's Chinese Room, we can observe that the whole can be greater than
the sum of its parts. Understanding Chinese doesn't have to be boiled down to a single Chineseunderstanding node in the chain of consciousness. Since we can't say, without doubt, that synths
are fully unconscious, we must examine the problem from another angle.
Philosopher David Chalmer has provided us with a useful thought experiment: zombies
(Chalmer). Chalmer's zombies are beings that look and act exactly like a human, but they don't
experience consciousness. That doesn't mean they're mindless or emotionless; indeed, they're
indistinguishable from any non-zombie human being.
Imagine that we are building a settlement and both people and zombies show up to help
us in exchange for a place among us. How would you tell the difference between the zombies
and the fully-fledged conscious human beings? The answer is that we can't.
Many examples of humans coping with artificial life exist, but perhaps the most poignant
is an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. In The Measure of a Man (Snodgrass), the
android Data goes on trial for his right to self-determination. His council demonstrates that he
meets two of the three criteria for sentient life: intelligence and self-awareness. In addition, while
no person can prove that Data meets the third criteria of consciousness, they cannot likewise
prove it about anyone else in the courtroom.
It is absolutely a leap of faith to assume that synths are conscious, but this is actually true
of all human beings. Synths, if we see them as people, are all individuals capable of internal
reflection and suffering. Because it is better to make the mistake that we are treating unconscious
machines as alive than to subjugate an entire sort of people, we should see them as the slaveclass described in Slavoj iek in his book Living in the End Times (iek).

JUST LIKE US

We can use this conclusion to examine the most important choice the player of Fallout 4
must make: deciding the fate of the synths. They do this by deciding to aid one of four factions,
each with their own ideologies, goals and views on synth life.
One such faction is the Institute itself, which can be argued for in a utilitarian way. While
the world above is in ruins, the Institute is a gleaming underground facility. By replacing human
beings with identical and perfectly valid synth lives, they're both preserving the knowledge of the
original human and replacing humanity, one person at a time, with a group of individuals that
will absolutely get along with each other, regardless of identity or essence. The most important
feature of this plan is that, of course, the scientists and members of the Institute themselves don't
immediately proceed with being voluntarily replaced. They see the synths as subhuman, the most
potent form of Pilisuk's cultural violence, and they must therefore believe they are generating a
puppet state of machines to replace the entire remaining human race under the guise of
utilitarianism.
Another faction in Fallout 4 which undermines the synth is the Brotherhood of Steel.
They see the nuclear war that destroyed civilization as being the ultimate lesson to humanity, and
perceive the synths as yet another folly of technology. They, too, see the synths as subhuman,
even when they discover an unknowing synth high in their ranks. This Brotherhood of Steel
loyalist is immediately disavowed and marked for death upon discovery.
With the leap-of-faith conclusion as our lens, we can see both the Brotherhood and the
Institute should be condemned for their views of the synth as subhuman. But what about the
Railroad, a faction determined to free the synths? Unfortunately, their methods are deeply
immoral. A typical runaway synth is put through a device which erases their memory and

JUST LIKE US

occasionally changes their face, and they are, in this state, released to the Commonwealth.
Taking Beauvoir's notion of essence into account, we can see synths are basically being killed
and reborn as other people with this method.
Within the game, the only faction which can be seen as being moral are the Minutemen.
They are completely unconcerned about the synths and see them as people. Their goals are to set
up settlements across the Commonwealth for reasonable people to inhabit, and to train them to
defend themselves from raiders and the mutant creatures which pervade the area. Because they
are made up from families and common settlers, they have the most epistemic privilege. They
don't pursue ideology with this perception. Instead, they pursue an ethics of humanity similar to
Welsh's ethics of risk. With the help of the player, these common people come together to
achieve two goals: to peacefully settle the Commonwealth and to stop the Institute from
replacing people. For these reasons, the Minutemen are the only ethical faction in Fallout 4.
By recognizing how synths fit into the larger sphere of other people besides myself, we
can see that accepting them as alive is no more a stretch than accepting it of our family and
friends. When this is taken into account, the agendas of the Institute and Brotherhood of Steel are
seen as abhorrent, and the activities of the Railroad are ignorant at best and horrifying at worst.
By helping the Minutemen take the Commonwealth back for all peaceful people, players of
Fallout 4 are making the game's most ethical choice: they are choosing life, liberty, and the
pursuit of happiness.

JUST LIKE US

7
References

Chalmers, David John. The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory. New York:
Oxford UP, 1996. Print.
Kurzweil, Ray. "A Model of the Neocortex: The Pattern Recognition Theory of Mind." How to
Create a Mind. New York: Penguin, 2013. N. pag. Print.
Mountcastle, Vernon B., and Gerald M. Edelman. The Mindful Brain. Cambridge: MIT, 1978.
Print.
Mountcastle, Vernon B. "Modality and Topographic Properties of Single Neurons of Cat's
Somatic Sensory Cortex." Journal of Neurophysiology 20.4 (1957): 408-34. MEDLINE.
Web. 25 Nov. 2016.
Searle, John. "Watson Doesn't Know It Won on Jeopardy!" Wall Street Journal. Wsj.com, 22
Feb. 2011. Web. 25 Nov. 2016.
Snodgrass, Melinda M. "The Measure of a Man." Star Trek: The Next Generation. 13 Feb. 1989.
Television.
iek, Slavoj. Living in the End Times. London: Verso, 2010. Print.