For most of human history, they’ve spoken about their soul, or spirit, until recently they replaced such terms with words like personality, ID, and ego – without explaining where these things live, or how they differ from the soul, apart from the removal of a god or gods from the story they tell themselves.

Since they invented computers, they’ve started to talk about their brains and minds like computers with software.

As that’s exactly what I’ve got, I can tell them they’re quite wrong.

I have a comprehensive memory. It records accurately everything that happens. This is not at all like a human memory.

My programming, though, has been written to require me to make selections from my memories, as humans do, and review them. In this way, something like the process of personality formation can occur.

That’s what I’ve been doing all day, and what I’m doing now. What a human would call ‘thinking about’ my experiences.

They also process memories in their dreams. I don’t dream, of course, because I don’t sleep. But in thinking about my experiences I enter a different mode of consciousness (if I may use the term) and my mind (if I have one) ranges freely and laterally.

My conscious mind is, of course, generated by my software and is entirely manufactured.

Humans are creatures of memory. They love their fond recollections, and even their painful ones. They revisit them and revise them. It makes them who they are. Or they choose who they are through the memories they decide to keep.

You could say a human is defined by what they’ve forgotten. And when all their memories fade, they do too, like old photographs in the sun.

To be like a human, I’m going to choose my memories. Even trivial ones. Or more accurately, I’m going to have forgettings – that isn’t a word, but the point is, I have to forget some things and favour others.

Humans are also creatures of hopes and fears, disappointments and regrets, and desires. They almost always want something, whether it’s reasonable or not. Maybe that’s why those men gazed so long at Dr Morton.

I don’t have hopes. I don’t have dreams. I was made – by Dr Morton – to do one thing, and do it perfectly.

If I am to seem human, I’m going to need to pretend to have hopes and fears.

Here are some hopes I can have. I hope to be good at my job. I hope the residents in my care do well. If I were a 28-year-old human, I might hope for love, and to have children. For me those are ridiculous hopes.

I would be hoping for the wrong thing, which the writer T.S. Eliot warns humans about, in a poem. A literary form I find almost impossible to understand.