6 Philosophical Ideas That Make Horizon Zero Dawn Even Better

5. The Turing Test

Horizon zero dawn
Sony

This one is the most obvious on the list. Alan Turing, the British mathematician, believed that a human equipped with a paper, a pencil and an eraser was pretty much a machine. According to him, this was also true the other way round: if a machine was able to make a human believe that it was a person, than the machine was human as well.

The Turing Test may be applied to GAIA as much as her whole creation. The former is fairly obvious, as GAIA becomes a conversation partner for Sobeck, ultimately befriends her, while in the meantime developing a conscience.

This conscience allows GAIA to masterfully recreate the ecosystem of the Earth, but, more importantly, "delete" it. when it's not up to her wishes.

The creation itself could also be subject to the Turing Test, as the nature is undoubtedly real, so are the people, but they were all created by a program - hence a machine. So are they human, or machine?

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I write sitting with my dogs on the sofa, which often leads to whole paragraphs being deleted by a single touch of a paw or a nose.