V, One other thought. In our complacency we think we know what life is, it's soft, hairy, smelly, meatware that sh.gs to propagate. No! Some life propagates by asexual processes. Some things are right on the boarder-line of what we call life, viruses and prions.
It seems the thing that qualifies a process as life is that it passes information down the generations against the tendency of entropy to increase; it may or may not be subject to natural selection processes in a hard or soft manner. So a self-repairing, replicating robot could be life. Being hardware, the selection pressures on it might be quite gentle (not much worry about resource poverty or radiation damage then). So in the 4th order category how do you know for some higher organism that you are nothing more than some 'simple' 'artificial' creation? Face it, you're complacent. R. ....................................... Website http://luna.bton.ac.uk/~roc1 .......................................
