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*What is "Life"?

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What defines something as alive?
Independent existence. 13%  13%  [ 3 ]
Motor activity/movement, however slow/limited. 0%  0%  [ 0 ]
Sense "organs"/sensory functions which determine reactions. 4%  4%  [ 1 ]
Transformation of energy received/construction of new material. 17%  17%  [ 4 ]
Capable of constructing and maintaining an ion/electrical gradient. 0%  0%  [ 0 ]
"Life force". 25%  25%  [ 6 ]
Other, please explain in thread. 42%  42%  [ 10 ]
Total votes : 24

greenblue
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24 Sep 2008, 3:57 pm

Haliphron wrote:
greenblue wrote:
We may have to wait for strong AI to arise to confirm that :P


Once again, your confusing life with consciousness. They are Not the same thing :!:
Bacteria are alive, but they are most certainly NOT conscious.Ditto for fungi, plants, protists, and animals without central nervous systems. If AI finally succeeds in producing conscious computers, they STILL wont qualify as living because (inorganic)machines cannot reproduce or self-replicate. The closest you could get would be a sentient robot that builds identical copies of itself from preexisting parts.

well I agree, however, if computers gain consciousness and being able to communicate with humans, someday, if that happens, then perhaps, the definition of life would change or would expand or at least it will be a great debate, most likely if that happens.


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Haliphron
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24 Sep 2008, 4:59 pm

greenblue wrote:
Haliphron wrote:
greenblue wrote:
We may have to wait for strong AI to arise to confirm that :P


Once again, your confusing life with consciousness. They are Not the same thing :!:
Bacteria are alive, but they are most certainly NOT conscious.Ditto for fungi, plants, protists, and animals without central nervous systems. If AI finally succeeds in producing conscious computers, they STILL wont qualify as living because (inorganic)machines cannot reproduce or self-replicate. The closest you could get would be a sentient robot that builds identical copies of itself from preexisting parts.

well I agree, however, if computers gain consciousness and being able to communicate with humans, someday, if that happens, then perhaps, the definition of life would change or would expand or at least it will be a great debate, most likely if that happens.


Why would the definition of *life* change? A sentient computer doesnt "eat", it simply consumes electrical energy and none of that energy goes into maintaining its structure. Furthemore, if its not housed inside of a robot than it certainly CANT reproduce.
AI is the attempt to develop sentience in a nonliving machine :wink: .



twoshots
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24 Sep 2008, 5:47 pm

LKL wrote:
twoshots wrote:
Biology isn't exactly the gold standard for precision anywho.


That's sort of the point. It's pretty hard to be precise with anything more complicated than the parabolic trajectory of a projectile on a windless day.

Computational infeasibility doesn't say that math doesn't describe reality, it just says we need bigger computers. Unless you're saying that the nonexistence of non-numerical solutions for, say, a set of PDEs implies that they aren't describing reality, in which case "huh?"


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LKL
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24 Sep 2008, 11:20 pm

regardless of the size of the computer, in biology there are often simply too many variables (often interacting too rapidly) to be able to input the data into the computer and get a prediction that isn't obsolete before it's calculated. Maybe when the tech (and the computation equipment) is small enough and sophisticated enough to do real-time measurements on hundreds of factors, we will start to see more non-statistics math in biology.

As it stands, the human brain is generally often than a mathematical algorithm at predicting and describing biological processes, though we often can't say why we made the prediction we did. When we have computers as sophisticated as a human brain, maybe we'll get somewhere...



Haliphron
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25 Sep 2008, 1:46 am

LKL wrote:
regardless of the size of the computer, in biology there are often simply too many variables (often interacting too rapidly) to be able to input the data into the computer and get a prediction that isn't obsolete before it's calculated. Maybe when the tech (and the computation equipment) is small enough and sophisticated enough to do real-time measurements on hundreds of factors, we will start to see more non-statistics math in biology.

As it stands, the human brain is generally often than a mathematical algorithm at predicting and describing biological processes, though we often can't say why we made the prediction we did. When we have computers as sophisticated as a human brain, maybe we'll get somewhere...


Just wait until we have QUANTUM computing! Then the intractibility of biological systems will be solved :D
BTW LKL, there ARE mathematical models that do an amazingly accurate job of predicting biological systems-they're called Cellular Automata :wink: .Computers perform most mathematical calculation FAR better than the human brain can. Computers can even prove theorems will fewer errors than we can 8O . The ONLY thing that computers really emulate is Creativity(yet......).



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25 Sep 2008, 2:05 am

"...the human brain is generally often than a mathematical algorithm at predicting..."

Err, that should read, "...the human brain is often better than a mathematical algorithm at predicting..."

and, of course computers are better at performing formal mathematical calculations. Of course computers can prove theorums better than humans.
However, human brains can somehow perceive and integrate and predict from biological systems much more quickly, and often more accurately, than computers can, because computers need a mathematical formula with all the data properly inputted, and somehow the human brain is able to work with much more tenuous data and more tenuous connections.
Intuition - no computer has that, either (yet).



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25 Sep 2008, 5:58 am

Philsophy can perhaps answer this question better than Science. I think the poll should have been titled "What is HUMAN Life? What does it mean to be human?"



Haliphron
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25 Sep 2008, 10:03 am

slowmutant wrote:
Philsophy can perhaps answer this question better than Science. I think the poll should have been titled "What is HUMAN Life? What does it mean to be human?"


What it means to be Human is a philosophical question but what is *life* is a scientific question. Several people are confusing life with sentience. But do you honestly believe that bacteria are alive because they are instilled with a *life force*? How about plants and fungi? :?



chever
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25 Sep 2008, 10:15 am

Haliphron wrote:
Bacteria are alive, but they are most certainly NOT conscious.Ditto for fungi, plants, protists, and animals without central nervous systems. If AI finally succeeds in producing conscious computers, they STILL wont qualify as living because (inorganic)machines cannot reproduce or self-replicate.


http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchR ... g+automata

Haliphron wrote:
The closest you could get would be a sentient robot that builds identical copies of itself from preexisting parts.


What do you think mining is for?


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25 Sep 2008, 10:15 am

Life can exist as non-sentient, but sentience always exists as life. There's sentience and then there's sapience. The former is demonstrated in a dog, while thre latter is demonstrated in human beings. Also, should we consideer defining life against its true opposite which is not death but rather non-life? (A paperwight is non-life.)



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25 Sep 2008, 10:17 am

greenblue wrote:
We may have to wait for strong AI to arise to confirm that :P


Strong AI might be turn out to be a pipe-dream after all.



Haliphron
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25 Sep 2008, 12:22 pm

slowmutant wrote:
greenblue wrote:
We may have to wait for strong AI to arise to confirm that :P


Strong AI might be turn out to be a pipe-dream after all.


Why?



ouinon
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25 Sep 2008, 2:03 pm

:drunken:



Last edited by ouinon on 26 Sep 2008, 2:45 am, edited 1 time in total.

LKL
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25 Sep 2008, 2:07 pm

Life/nonlife is a fuzzy boundary, as with so much in biology. The more we learn, the scarcer absolutes become.



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25 Sep 2008, 2:29 pm

LKL wrote:
Life/nonlife is a fuzzy boundary, as with so much in biology. The more we learn, the scarcer absolutes become.


You dont like reductionism now, do you LKL :lol:

It IS possible that consciousness is something metaphysical. Surely it seems to be more than just a mechanical process, but its a little too early to tell. So Slowmutant: you finally admit that non-sentient life is actually not metaphysical, right?



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25 Sep 2008, 6:38 pm

"Life" is a breakfast cereal.

"Life" is a board game, in which one spins a spinner in order to advance one's token around the board.

"Life" is an interesting computer simulation game.

Anything I missed?


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