Children of Memory (Children of Time, #3)

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Sometimes the friends we meet along the way were inside us all along…

“The essential fallacy,” Gothi picks up, “is that humans and other biologically evolved, calculating engines feel themselves to be sentient, when sufficient investigation suggests this is not so. And that sentience, as imagined by the self-proclaimed sentient, is an illusion manufactured by a sufficiently complex series of neural interactions. A simulation, if you will.”

“We think that it is better not to be sentient. Imagine how hard that would be, to actually have to think about things all the time.”

“Think of it this way. You’re an alien symbiote incorporating an encoded memory of a human woman, whom you’re currently simulating with sufficient fidelity that you can believe you’re her. I’m a simulation of a different human woman who was encoded into a computer, and then spent far too long as ants before being decanted into this blank body. We neither of us have much in the way of intellectual property rights, now do we?”

Knowledge and understanding is the crown atop the hierarchy of needs, the thing you can’t have enough of.