A PASSAGE FROM GHOUL WORLD ABOUT OUR ROBOTIC NATURES

The following passage is from Chapter 16 of Ghoul World, my scifi novel. It concerns free will. 

On the sidewalk outside Color Me Coffee, Charley Manning watched Beaunita’s Elec2Go disappear out of the Pearl District. The rain had drizzled out, but clouds still formed an unbroken ceiling above. As the PI turned his attention from Beaunita’s departing cab, he suddenly and forcefully perceived himself as "waiting to feel" what he must do next. Would he wire for an Elec2Go cab for himself or take a trolley or walk home? He remembered the first time he’d consciously experienced the sensation of ‘waiting to know’ what he should do next, of waiting for a feeling to tell him what to do.

During a similar momentary pause one morning nineteen years ago, Manning had first caught himself being a robot, a biological one. He’d recently quit the PPB and had awakened feeling exceptionally refreshed and pushed himself into a seated position against the headboard. He had nothing pressing to do that morning. The anxiety that was normally his condition when he was involved in police work was gone. He was luxuriating in that sensation of untroubled repose when a thought appeared out of nowhere. He abruptly realized that he desired to go drink a latte and read the history text about Roman legions he’d recently downloaded from the internet. But it wasn’t the awareness of what he wanted to do next that intrigued him; it was the fact that the thought about what he would do next came out of nowhere. Something beyond his control, he realized, had informed him what he would do next.

Immediately following his first awareness of what he was going to do next, his brain without any direction on his part began to produce thoughts about one coffee shop after another where he might go to drink coffee and read. The list was a set of fleeting impressions about each of the coffee shops he most frequented. These impressions entered and passed swiftly through his consciousness, and he experienced faint negative and positive sensations about the individual coffee shops that presented themselves to his consciousness. At that moment he became aware that he was consciously waiting for his emotions to tell him which coffee shop to go to. He—or, rather, his consciousness—was waiting to be told what to do. That awareness immediately led to another astonishing moment.

As soon as he experienced the awareness of “waiting to be told what to do,” Manning was overcome with euphoria, a skin-tingling whole body feeling of exultation. Never before had the PI felt so untroubled. So free? That word “freedom” had sailed unbidden into his consciousness obviously attached to the euphoric feeling, just as each feeling and word that morning had arrived without any consciousness on his part of their being requested.

Manning still struggled to understand the paradoxical sensation of being free that was connected to an awareness that the ghoul species, every man jack of them, was a species of biological robots whose free will was an illusion. From then on Manning explained his behavior to himself—only occasionally to others—as the actions of a biological robot who knew itself to be a robot. Manning frequently speculated if self-knowledge of his automaton existence meant he had one foot out the door toward a real freedom, unenforced by evolution’s dictates. As he put it to close friends: “Maybe self knowledge will set us free.”