Since the (meta)human body is basically a set of well understood chemical reactions and mechanical action/reactions but is able to generate an aura and become magically active, is it ever possible that an adequately advanced A.I. could become 'alive' and begin to generate a visible aura of its own? Or if even more advanced become magically active?

at this point IRL we are able to simulate the neural network of something the size of a mouse.

and that's on a shoestring university research budget. no military/corporate are really working on it,

or at least, working and talking about it.

if they can't simulate the entire metahuman neurosystem (or better) by 2070, I'd say something is wrong.

but to answer your question, the answer is "No"

not in the "I can cast spells and summon spirits" sense. in the technomancer area, probably.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, can there be a Soul of Silicon?

Who knows... Perhaps. A dilema for philosophers, I believe.

Depends on how Magical Theory actually works in SR, but I'm going to say no, and here's why:

Anything with sufficient dynamic complexity creates a Mana field around it. The Earth, for example, produces a substantial Mana field due to the insane amount of biological life that exists on it. Each of those little organisms creates a slight amount of ambient Mana, all aspected to the same kind of background ('living organic matter'), and they all inter-relate synergistically during periods of proper Metaplanar alignment to create the Earth's ambient mana level.

A sufficiently complex AI does produce an equivalent Mana level to a sufficiently complex metahuman - but that Mana level isn't aspected to biological life. So yeah, if you had an entire planet of robotic organisms and AIs, that planet would have its own mana cycle, and during high points the robots could cast their own brands of robot-magic. But that robot-magic would be a completely different kind of background count than the kind that biological mana fields are designed to interact with.

Huh. Maybe that's what the Resonance is - a secondary mana field generated by the dynamic complexity of our technology, aspected to non-biotic lifeforms!

No from me.

On a technicality, yes. If a full conversion cyborg from Augmentation were to have the brain's conciousness elimenated, yet itself remain functional, theoretically an A.I. could control the cyborg body and learn enough about the metahuman brain to use it through it's neurological link to the 'borg. Plus it'd make a neat plot thingee.

So basically they could eventually qualify as alive, but, as you say the 'aspect' of the mana they produce is so different from what is avaible, it would be like being in near void conditions for any 'awakened' A.I.?

That's how my Mage would theorize it, yeah. Of course, since he (or any biological, assensing Awakened being) could never really tell the difference between that and it not producing mana at all, the question may be moot.

A world without biological life but with a machine civilization would not be aspected towards mechanical existence, it would be aspected towards sterility. The complex processes required to create thinking machines are antithetic to magic. We know this because of object resistance. But intelligent electronic machines have something completely different from magic. They have Resonance. This is something that magic can't touch, though the two are very much alike. It is something that no magician can reproduce.



Ah, it is not the body that makes the metahuman alive. The body is merely an imperfect reflection of the metaphysical Idea of the person. The flesh is nothing more than a copy made from a transcendent blueprint that Plato called a Form and that the magicians for the Fourth World called a True Pattern. You can cut off a piece, grow another, and sew it on without becoming a different person precisely because of this. The body matters not. It is the Essence that matters, the metaphysical ideal that the body represents and sustains.

Machines don't have Essence and they don't have True Patterns and they will never, never, get either under their own power with their own devices.

A sufficiently powerful act of blood magic might grant a True Pattern to a machine, making it magically "alive", but such an act requires the voluntary sacrificial act on the part of a Namegiver, a member of a small handful of species including metahumans, sprites, dragons, and obsidimen. Even then, it might not make an A.I. "alive" so much as make its current body "alive". The Resonance-based entity is the A.I. is not tied to any one body and thus could leave the magically-imbued shell at any time, thus wouldn't really be magically "alive" just as riding a horse doesn't make you an equine.

But being alive to Resonance is just as valid a state of being as being alive to magic is. Human ingenuity has given rise to a new metaphysics that can co-exist with the old.

It really depends on what you want to do with it, I guess.

Said the robot to the samurai, on the eve of battle:


Going the other way is also interesting:



Personally, if I was going to tell a story in SR with the aliveness of AIs as a major plot point, I'd pick giving them essence, edge, and access to sacrifice magic. If it wasn't going to be a major point of the campaign, I'd stuck with giving them resonance or no special stats at all.

I'm just not sure where in SR the biology/DNA/Protein end, and the soul begins. This is why I am having a hard time determining what to do about it. SR Seems to indicate evolution occurred, as it speaks of DNA and genetic relations, and as such if humans evolved, at what point in our evolutionary processes did we become 'alive'? When we reached the complexity of bacteria? When did we become capable of magic?

What if you allowed the A.I. Access to its own code so it could rewrite it? Or allowed 2 A.I.s to swap code when making a progeny A.I.?
If you gave them access to nanites which could build the quantum cores you'd need to run a sentient machine, so they could self reproduce? Could they evolve a soul? If they had all that was required to replicate and 'evolve' on their own, ie nanoforges to build new cores, and bodies to house them. If they could 'tinkier' with their own code, or just replicate and make imperfect copies of themselves and undergo Darwinian processes. I'm guessing the first self replicating RNA strands didn't have souls, so those had to have shown up later, I'm just curious when? And could a similair process occur in an artificial life form? Lab generated organisms in SR have auras, even if they were wholly made in the lab out of a vat of nonliving chemicals.

It depends to an extent. If you take the biological route to computing power, crossref Deus' Network, the Hyperion books and others, then presumably the computing unit would have an essense score. Whether this makes the A.I using such a system alive is a different matter.

DNA is not a proof that something evolved in SR. you can design a completely new critter from scratch and have it birthed from a mechanical womb in SR, and it will have DNA just like you and me. it certainly didn't evolve that way, but it would still have DNA.

also, SR still has connections to ED. they aren't as blatantly stated, but lofwyr didn't just suddenly disappear, and neither did ghostwalker, ehran the scribe, aina, harlequin, or any of the other 4th world beings. you just don't hear about them (or at least, about them being from the 4th world) as much is all.

as such, the closest thing we have to a reliable explanation on where life came from in SR is the ED dragons of barsaive book which gives an origin story according to the dragons, going back to the first world. iirc, the basic version is that one of the horrors decided all the other horrors were stupid jerks, and decided to create life on our world =P (naturally, the other horrors all threw a fit*, and now they invade all the time... what a bunch of stupid jerks)

*(actually, i'm pretty sure the horrors still just invade purely because they like to kill, destroy, torture, maim, etc, and that they could care less how the stuff they kill, destroy, torture, maim, etc, came into existance)

incidentally, it is theoretically possible to create life using ED-level magic, and it could presumably be made permanent in some way or another (certainly, dragons managed to pull it off with drakes... not sure if Naming the spell would be enough?). no ED spell known to the general people of barsaive appears to be able to create Name-Givers that i can see in the two main books though...