When computers go to sleep,
I wonder if they dream?
Do they have a program,
To keep the hard-drive clean?
When they're not active,
Do they defragment while passive,
And check for faulty bytes,
Or do they simply stop,
And enter a void of inertia,
Does its process take flight,
Leaving nothing but charged matter,
Yet does it even know,
That it's calculating my workflow,
Does it feel or see,
Anything that it does for me,
It makes real decisions,
According to its rational thought,
Just like we all do,
Yet it doesn't have a fault,
The human is always controlling,
And making it perceive,
Does it actually know it though,
Or does all to us it leave?
How do we become conscious,
Are our brains that different to laptops?
Nervous systems give us sensations,
And analogous computations,
The I within my body,
That identifies with my thought,
Is that absent in the computer,
Because we didn't program it in?
Or is it more universal,
A conscious vein of being,
That knits within all of us,
Without us knowing or seeing,
And then if we design a computer,
That adequately resembles life,
Will this vein of consciousness,
Decide to enter in time?
We can never know,
In this current realm of thought,
Yet perhaps one day there'll be truth,
On this matter and many more.
Rowan Blair Colver