Board Thread:Speculation House/@comment-4830106-20140808001942/@comment-24891101-20140809215827

And I, for one, take the opposite: a "soul" is convenient shorthand for the emergent property of consciousness and all that entails, given a sufficiently advanced neural net, or similar, regardless of origin. That said, the metaphysics here are foggy, at best. On the Penny/Aura thread, I opined that she currently lacks Aura, given that Aura use is a basic combat skill, and she's combat ready. However, we know that the strength of one's Aura differs from person to person, and parallels can probably be drawn to muscle. She's probably only come on line recently, a few months to a year, so hers is not nearly as developed. Her neural architecture (I'm assuming what sets her apart from the AIs and robots we've seen is that she's got a neural net, rather than a conventional processor; the AIs are glorified chatterbots, all sophisticated programming, and the combat robots are clearly not sapient.) may still be developing, hence "Your time will come". A toddler wandering out of ... wherever you put toddlers. That should fit the Pinnochio motif well enough.