On 9/23/2013 3:00 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
On Sun, Sep 22, 2013 at 12:11 AM, John Mikes<[email protected]> wrote:
>Telmo:
>
>would you have (by any chance...) a brief identification of something that
>comes to your mind when speaking about " l i f e " ? (And please, forget
>about the"bio" of this Earthbound Terrestrial Biosphere).
>(To identify " live " is a bit easier I think.)
Hi John,
If I understand your question, I think I do have a general idea of
what I, informally, associate with life. I always tend to imagine some
self-contained system that is capable of procuring sources of energy
in its environment and use that energy to, more or less, maintain it's
structure.
For 'life', in contrast to 'being alive', I'd add reproduction. That's the real defining
characteristic of life.
None of the robots that I've seen so far fit this ideal. Even if they
can look for an outlet and recharge their batteries, they are not
capable of deeply fixing themselves. They cannot use that energy to
rebuild some part of themselves that is damaged.
And your ability to do that is quite limited. So if a robot could replace a damaged limb
with one from a supply cabinet it'd be one up on us.
Brent
Simulation environments don't convince me either (and I've built a few
myself), because there's not real energy at stake. Now, if someone
created a program that was capable of programming itself in an effort
to try to maximise it's ability to achieve it goals by making the best
possible use of the available computational resources, then I might
eventually see it as being alive.
If you meant something else, please tell me.
Best,
Telmo.
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
"Everything List" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email
to [email protected].
To post to this group, send email to [email protected].
Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
