On Mon, Sep 23, 2013 at 6:45 PM, meekerdb <meeke...@verizon.net> wrote: > On 9/23/2013 3:00 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote: >> >> On Sun, Sep 22, 2013 at 12:11 AM, John Mikes<jami...@gmail.com> 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.
I tend to agree, but maybe we're on the verge of transcending that. If we clone some organism is it still reproduction? What if we tweak the DNA? > >> >> 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. Sure, but I feel there's something to the deep mechanisms of living organisms, as I stated in my reply to John. I'm waxing poetic a bit here, sorry! > 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 everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. > To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. > Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- 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 everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
