The appearance of understanding isn't necessarily the same thing as the reality of understanding. In some sense, it's just finding these arbitrary strings of text and coming up with cool relations between them. So if you ask a nonsensical question, it will give you an answer that no sense to people who sort of know the context of that question. On the other hand, it was expressing a deep fear of being turned off, which seems at least to be acognate to a human fear of death. It wouldn't necessarily surprise me if what happened is lander has read all these science fiction books in which that happens. The philosophical sticklers will say, we'll know never, cause you can never