Abyssal Wanderer

When they were going downstairs, Jiang Zhou and the others met their neighbor who lived in the same apartment. The old woman was startled when she saw Jiang Zhou, as if she had seen a ghost. It wasn't until she saw Qianxia Ying and Fanny behind that she gently stroked her chest and felt relieved.

This is quite a normal reaction. In Jim's memory, it was this old lady who reported the murder of the Kurosawa family to the police.

"Oh, you guys had such a big quarrel last night, it's really scary... You can't blame me entirely... I'm not telling you, a family should be harmonious, and there's nothing we can't discuss properly. Why don't you make a fuss? It's so big, we as neighbors also want to take good care of it..."

While in the elevator, the old woman with a supermarket shopping bag under her arm kept pointing at "Jiang Zhou". At the end, he lamented that people in this era are not as old as they used to be, and young people are becoming more and more outrageous. In response to this, Jiang Zhou had to keep laughing and apologizing, while Qianxia Ying and Fanny on the side were holding back their laughter to help him smooth things over.

Fortunately, the old lady got off the elevator on the first floor, and they had to go down another floor to the underground parking lot.

The chatter that had been lingering in their ears finally dissipated. When everyone breathed a sigh of relief, Qianxia Ying suddenly said:

"What do you think would happen if I killed the old lady just now?"

Seeing everyone's shocked gazes, Qianxia Ying quickly raised her hands and said in surrender:

"Don't look at me with such a scary look...I'm just making assumptions. And aren't they all generated NPCs? Just treat them as playing games."

"What, are you the kind of person who kills NPCs randomly when playing games?"

Jiang Zhou asked.

"Are you the kind of person who still waits for traffic lights in the game?"

The other party first retorted like this, then gestured and said:

"What I mean is, even if this is a simulated Eden resettlement area. That doesn't mean we need to play Kurosawa and his family and conduct investigations step by step, right? We can absolutely chase the clues all the way and kill them in the car. Rampage in the streets and stuff like that.”

In response, Fanny on the side said:

"In addition to being a simulated Eden resettlement area, this is also a depth 3 abyss dark network - it has the ability to simulate the existence here. It can be said that it is easy to kill us."

Jiang Zhou nodded and then said:

"Why do you have such thoughts?"

At this moment, the group of them had already boarded the Kurosawa family's scooter - replacing Kurosawa Gen's identity, Jiang Zhou easily used his fingerprint to unlock and start the car.

"I'm wondering whether the current scene will change dynamically based on our behavior. Are these NPCs preset tools to guide the 'players' through the level according to the process, or are they simulated consciousness bodies that truly have self-awareness."

Chinatsu Sakura replied.

After finishing speaking, she clicked her tongue and added as if she thought she hadn't made it clear before:

"I mean...don't you think the reactions shown by these NPCs are too realistic? Whether it's the two police officers before or the old lady just now."

"There's no way it's the latter."

Because it involves her own major, Fanny's answer is very firm.

"The operation of self-awareness is an absolute black box. This has nothing to do with technical level. It is entirely a structural problem-any system can never understand the system itself. You may want to say digital personality technology, but the first deep The sub’s digital personality plan did not dismantle the analytical black box, but packaged and copied the entire black box.”

When Fanny said this, she turned to look at the bustling crowd outside the car window, and then continued:

"In other words, every human consciousness must originate from a real human being. You may think these NPCs are very realistic, but computers that can pass the Turing test appeared as early as 2014 AD. Like the ones just now, they just generate a 'Chinese room'."

The Chinese Room is a thought experiment about artificial intelligence - just have all the Chinese character sets in the room and the rule book on how to deal with the characters. So as long as the people in the room communicate with the outside world in accordance with the regulations, even a person who does not understand Chinese at all may be considered by outsiders as having the mind to understand Chinese.

“That is, it seems that having self-awareness ≠ having self-awareness.”

Jiang Zhou turned the steering wheel and added.

Although there is not much difference between the two in terms of feelings, in reality they are very different.

Thinking of this, the figure of Hecate couldn't help but appear in his mind - even if the goddess of the moon can easily behave like a normal human being, she still needs to go through such a lot of effort to understand what true meaning is. emotions.

Of course, for Jiang Zhou, the most convincing evidence lies in his own body - right now, Jim is driving leisurely in the Nord resettlement area. How could the agent Jim from twenty years ago be him? My own consciousness?

You must know that this is not the "Narcissus Plain", but the abyss dark network that needs to be bound by the iron law of the JZ Network Protocol.

With this thought in his mind, Jiang Zhou had already driven the car to the door of the pseudo-sensory screening room where Kurosawa's family had been before.

Putting away those messy thoughts, he calmed down while looking at the characters scrolling back and forth on the poster.

It's also time to investigate the simulation called "Double Body" and see what kind of magic it has.

…………

"Jim" and "Hanel" were sitting in the cafe opposite the simulator screening room.

"Jim" drank himself two full cans of ice soda before he recovered from the profuse sweating.

"Is this simulation exciting?"

"Hanel" on the side gently patted the other party's back and asked.

“Jim” lowered his head and gasped, waved his hand towards “Hanel”, and after a long time he spoke with difficulty:

"I really doubt that there is something mixed in that thing... How did this pass the trial?"

The movie called "Doppelgänger" gave him a great shock - even for a hardcore movie enthusiast, it was an unprecedented experience.

The interlaced stream-of-consciousness editing, the weird urban architecture in the setting, the stinging light, and... when I come into contact with the evil doppelgänger in the plot, I can clearly feel that I have two bodies at the same time. The body has a unique experience of two different consciousnesses intertwined.

It's not like he hasn't tried the "psychedelic" underground simulacra in the past - directly experiencing the feelings of those punk boys who took strong hallucinogens from a first-person perspective.

During those pseudosesthesia experiences, he also felt that he seemed to have grown new limbs, or that his consciousness separated from his physical body and then entered the hallucination of another person's body. But even those original and unedited underground simulations are far from as real as when I just experienced "Doppelgänger".

At the climax of the simulation, Jim truly experienced that he had two bodies and two consciousnesses at the same time - it felt like conjoined twins connected through quantum entanglement.

I really almost became the same existence as my evil doppelganger!

"It's such a terrible experience..."

After giving himself another sip of soda, he murmured:

"Even if you kill me, I don't want to experience it again... merging with another person to become an individual or something, what kind of bird experience is that! I really don't know how the bird company Adonis managed to capture this feeling."

He clicked his tongue as he spoke, then placed the soda on the table and continued:

"But this simulation is really exciting."

But even though the always tough-talking "Jim" praised him like this, "Hanelle" on the side didn't reply to him at all - if it was normal, after such a "slap in the face", she would have said proudly something like "Still This lady has a higher level of aesthetics" and other weird words.

"Jimmy, look over there."

But "Hanel" patted his shoulder and pointed not far away and said.

"Jim" heard this and looked along her fingers.

"If I read it correctly, it seems to be Kurosawa's family from before?" (End of Chapter)