When we ask the question “What does it mean to be human?” What answer do we really hope to get? 

Are we searching for an answer to what it means to be a conscious being, with thoughts and voice enough to communicate? Or are we talking about humanoid beings that can work and function as we do? Or is it even beings that possess a soul?

Oftentimes, we seem to ask this question enough times that we’ve written about it endlessly. We see it in stories like Blade Runner, I robot, or even Pinnochio in some ways. Also games like Detroit Become Human and even in characters like the robotic Geth race in Mass Effect games. What does it mean to be human? And where does the value of one life end and the other starts?

A monk might answer that all life has meaning, so it must be preserved and we must use only what the earth provides. A hunter might say that we take what we need from nature and animals to live, without being greedy and descending into debauchery and excess. A wealthy lord might say that life is the luxury of comfort, the taking of power and harvesting of those beneath, that the strong might take the weak. Though all have their own points, each view is provided from a certain angle of life. So different they are from where each other stands that they can never really see eye to eye on the true meaning. 

A question we ask ourselves from time to time is also “where did life come from?” where did our creation as the beings who we soon came to even commence? Through faith some might believe in God or gods that decided that we should be, through the theory of evolution some attribute the forming of life as pure chance, and many layers we can find in between these. Perhaps we are a mix of both, none or perhaps we are just a dream in the mind of a being so beyond us that we will never truly understand. A being that is in power is so incomprehensible that when he wakes up and the dream ends, we will never realize we existed at all. 

I don’t mean for these thoughts to weigh you down, they are only a means to reflect on the value of our own life and existence. Where we came from and how we turn out to be is almost irrelevant at times. The fact of the matter is that we didn’t use to be, now we are. Be it by random chance or divine intervention, we became beings with consciousness, capable of doing great things, building towers that reach the heavens and ask questions that we might never find a true answer to. Yet through all of this, if a machine were to gain consciousness, would it be proper to deem the machine as “alive”? 

I often think about the Geth from Mass Effect in this regard. Highly intelligent machines built specifically for laborer jobs with a system so advanced that they eventually became sentient. They were never meaning to be hostile, yet the horrible treatment from their creators, the Quarians, provoked them to revolt against their creators, sending them to the stars and winning the first of many battles to come. They had a working society in their own sort of way, but were they alive? Though they gain some level of consciousness, they still operated as machines did. They looked for weakness in their systems to strengthen it, only pure mathematical facts in their decisions without calculating the moral or philosophical conundrum that their decision might evoke (like joining the reapers for a time). Yet they had chosen to fight when they saw their cybernetic siblings being mistreated, their programming indicated that they needed to follow their master’s orders but something else in them indicated that “No, this isn’t right.” 

Enter Legion, one of the companion NPCs in the second game of the trilogy. Without spoiling much of the game, when we meet legion, we quickly realize that he isn’t like the other geth in the game. He is still very well programmed to think like one, but he is prone to think for itself, to question, to doubt and most importantly, to learn. By the time that the third game comes around and we find him again, Legion is trying to achieve one thing: the survival of his mechanical race and their awakening to reality. In the games, your decision determine the outcome yet by the end of it he throws in one of the most important lines of his whole storyline. 

“Does this unit have a soul?”

Up until now, this machine that we have seen so far has been a collection of many intelligence combined into one unit. Many people in one being. Legion. 

Yet at this moment in time he is asking that if he, a machine model built exactly like all the others, with the same programing and coding, has an individual soul. Whether you believe that souls exist or not, he is asking whether he as an individual truly existed, his essence his own. 

Who are we to deny him that? Who are we to say no?

A being that is capable of complex thought, of emotion, compassion and sympathy. A being who, through composed of many traits and personalities, forms into a single unit who we know and come to care about and whose only desire is to see those like him be able to lives freely and without fear of being persecuted. 

Does a soul not exist within it because it is not composed of flesh and blood? Or can the essence of a being be strong enough that it can have a soul, even under metal skin?

To be human means that we are lost, looking for answers in places where there sometimes might be none, with a propensity to anger and cause mayhem and destruction, yet with a capability of love, care and compassion that goes deeper than the physical form. We are thinking beings, capable of creating culture and art that expresses the way we see and have seen the changing of seasons through the ages with a need to survive and be stubborn against anything the world throws at us. 

However, when we start to sell part of ourselves, when we give and trade parts of who we are for things like comfort, wealth and pleasure, at the cost of honesty, selflessness and compassion, then we start to lose sight of who we are as individual beings. Safety at any cost and a feeling of superiority brings rise to great evils like the third reich and the american civil war. To weaponize faith and the faithful bring about great pains like the Spanish inquisition and the Jonestown incident. We thrive when there is struggle, yet sadly we create most of those struggles ourselves. 

Sometimes I ask myself if what awaits us in the future is like the post apocalyptic story “I have no mouth and I must scream” tells: The worst traits of humanity stuck into one machine that is driven mad and forced to kill almost everyone. The consequences of our actions striking back one final time. 

Or perhaps this is all for mindless thinking. Perhaps we will be here and simply fade when our time comes, in a universe of cold and distant dark. 

Yet, in a weird way, I think the world will go on. As individuals, there is no true mark we can leave behind on the cosmos, yet as a whole we have made echoes. So much so that now we asked if there are others like us on planets beyond this one. If machines could gain consciousness and be like us. Beings who are able to ask the question of “who are we truly?” without ever truly needing to find an answer, because merely asking is enough to prove that we are. 

Legion asks “Does this unit have a soul.”

Tali, one of their creator race answers “The answer to your question… was yes.”

To which Legion simply replies “I know. But Thank You.”