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tumblr is still the undisputed champion of made-up stories, though. a machine can tell you that january and february are followed by maruary, sure, but only a human can sit across from you at the cybercampfire and spin you a yarn of the webcomic fan who once filled a hotel bath with sharpie ink.

a mind is anything that autonomously decides. a vast array of pulleys and weights driven by waterwheel that can play chess "thinks" as much as you or i. however, it is undeniable that such systems are missing something. a clockwork man moving a pen to write of the recommended daily rock intake is thinking in a way somehow separate from the way a tumblr user does when they regale us the false history of how canadian public toilets came to be free.

perhaps thomas aquinas was onto something more real than reality when he posited that the matter of the body is only made whole when infused with the immaterial form of the soul. the large language model has a body, with golden veins carrying electron bloodstreams to silicon minds, yet a mirror reflecting it in the aetherial realm (were such a thing perceivable) would be as barren as it would be unsettling.

all the world's knowledge distilled into a trillion decimal numbers, directing text patterns through labyrinths of probabilistically weighted hallways, may produce a tome's worth of literature for the hallowed halls of reddit's Am I the Asshole in mere minutes. without that essential essence which truly gives us life, however, it cannot conceive of a story so intimately human, so false yet resonant, so us, as the tale of the "down with cis" bus.

do androids dream of smooth sharks?