Board Thread:Speculation House/@comment-4830106-20140806180925/@comment-24891101-20140823192134

I suppose the way to test this is to lop off someone's body parts and see what effect it has on their Aura. For my part, my conception of the soul is that it's a shorthand for neural complexity, and so the body doesn't really matter, and this colors my interpretation of fictional souls. In which case, the most important aspect of Penny is her brain, which'd be the most expensive bit. But if the body in toto generates Aura, then it's a different story.

It's possible, but unlikely. The mere existence of an artificial, android-generated Aura utterly disproves biological exceptionalism, and so there's really no need to have imitation reproductive organs that do nothing. I doubt that the checklist for Aura, so to speak, has "Possesses bits" on it. She doesn't have a circulatory system, or kidneys, or a spleen, or a lymphatic system either. Where do you draw the line?

I don't think, either, that she's the work of one man, co-opted by the government. Sure, he might've had his breakthrough, but would not have the resources to actually begin building her in earnest, and so he'd be brought into the military's own crypto-DARPA program, but not as team lead. And besides, if she were not initially designed for military applications, then she'd have to be mostly rebuilt, to accommodate the weapon systems we've seen, and to bring her chassis up to mil-spec. Unless part of the secret is actually "Has a vagina", then it'd be removed, if it had existed.