Fay groaned faintly. "Bugs operate by instinct, Gussy," he said. "A patterned routine. They do not scan situations and consequences and then make decisions."
"I don't expect bugs to make decisions," Gusterson said. "For that matter I don't like people who go around alla time making decisions."
"Well, you can take it from me, Gussy, that this tickler is just a miniaturized wire recorder and clock ... and a tickler. It doesn't do anything else."
"Not yet, maybe," Gusterson said darkly. "Not this model. Fay, I'm serious about bugs thinking. Or if they don't exactly think, they feel. They've got an interior drama. An inner glow. They're conscious. For that matter, Fay, I think all your really complex electronic computers are conscious too."
"You are. Computers simply aren't alive."
"What's alive? A word. I think computers are conscious, at least while they're operating. They've got that inner glow of awareness. They sort of ... well ... meditate."
"Gussy, computers haven't got any circuits for meditating. They're not programmed for mystical lucubrations. They've just got circuits for solving the problems they're on."
"Okay, you admit they've got problem-solving circuits--like a man has. I say if they've got the equipment for being conscious, they're conscious. What has wings, flies."
"Including stuffed owls and gilt eagles and dodoes--and wood-burning airplanes?"
"Maybe, under some circumstances. There _was_ a wood-burning airplane. Fay," Gusterson continued, wagging his wrists for emphasis, "I really think computers are conscious. They just don't have any way of telling us that they are. Or maybe they don't have any _reason_ to tell us, like the little Scotch boy who didn't say a word until he was fifteen and was supposed to be deaf and dumb."
"Because he'd never had anything to say. Or take those Hindu fakirs, Fay, who sit still and don't say a word for thirty years or until their fingernails grow to the next village. If Hindu fakirs can do that, computers can!"
Looking as if he were masticating a lemon, Fay asked quietly, "Gussy, did you say you're working on an insanity novel?"
Gusterson frowned fiercely. "Now you're kidding," he accused Fay. "The dirty kind of kidding, too."