On Mon, Sep 23, 2013 at 6:45 PM, meekerdb <[email protected]> wrote: > 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.
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 [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. -- 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.
