Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-39492511-20190807174432/@comment-39854843-20190817035553

Glitchee123z wrote: Yeah, Penny’s sentient, but that doesn’t mean she has a soul. The problem with determining whether or not a machine is sentient (something that's explored in many scifi movies involving intelligent androids) is that a robot programmed to seem human would intrinsically seem sentient, even if it truly wasn't. Penny seems to ponder her own existence. She seems to ask questions that a sentient being would ask. She seems to experience emotions. But the problem is that we have no way of knowing if she's truly pondering, asking, and experiencing those things; or if she's just programmed to.

In other words, Penny is only sentient if she is consciously choosing to behave this way. If she's simply running a script that is intended to make her seem human, then she's nothing more than an android. We have no way of knowing which one she is, until either:

A) The show gives us a glimpse of reality from Penny's perspective.

B) Someone in the show tells us whether or not she's sentient.