I read an interesting article I found off of Digg (which you can read here) that really got me thinking, what constitutes life? How do we exactly go about saying one thing is "alive" and another "not alive".
The question appears to be quite obvious when speaking about things we are very familiar with: IE humans, cats, dogs and mice clearly exhibit behaviors and qualities that rocks and stones do not. But there are many gray areas which demonstrate how fuzzy of a line the divider between "living" and not "living" can be:
Take for instance the problem with determining when someone (or something) is dead. How exactly do you determine when someone is dead? When their heart stops beating? Well, then you have an interesting phenomenon where people "die" and then come back to life quite commonly during certain procedures. Clearly we want our definition of "dead" to be such that it is irreversible. Someone should not be able to come back from the dead. But other forms of determining if someone is alive or not include less quantified approaches like loss of higher brain functions.
Secondly, this issue is manifested in the problem of classifying what does and does not classify as "life". Like mentioned previously, we all can agree that humans should fit under the classification of life, and that rocks should not. But what about a virus?
Life as we know it is comprised of cells, the basic building block of (at the very least) the majority of what we call life. These cells range in size, but are generally in the 200 nanometer ballpark. Viruses (and the new "nanobes" in the article mentioned in the beginning) are many times smaller than this, and are not comprised of the same building blocks. Many people use this to claim that they should not count as life, but on the other hand, they do still have DNA. I for one feel reluctant to call something with its own DNA "not life".
Viruses (which btw, should really be pluralized as "Virii") also seem to exhibit many of the qualities that we typically associate with living things, with the notable exception of needing a host to sustain itself. Making it a good topic for debate, indeed.
Lastly, are the implementation details important to being classified as life or not? Put it this way: All life as we know it is "carbon based", but why can't life be accomplished in another way? If we met an alien in a flying saucer which was not carbon based, surely we wouldn't classify them along with rocks as being "not alive" right?
Well, then why should robots be considered "not alive"? If you were to meet Data from Star Trek, would you classify him as alive, or not?
To begin actual debate, I hold the opinion that carbon chauvinism is silly and that a sufficiently sophisticated robot should certainly be classified as alive in a way no different than a human. This would stem from a classification of life based not on what it is made of, but what characteristics and behaviors they exhibit.
The question appears to be quite obvious when speaking about things we are very familiar with: IE humans, cats, dogs and mice clearly exhibit behaviors and qualities that rocks and stones do not. But there are many gray areas which demonstrate how fuzzy of a line the divider between "living" and not "living" can be:
Take for instance the problem with determining when someone (or something) is dead. How exactly do you determine when someone is dead? When their heart stops beating? Well, then you have an interesting phenomenon where people "die" and then come back to life quite commonly during certain procedures. Clearly we want our definition of "dead" to be such that it is irreversible. Someone should not be able to come back from the dead. But other forms of determining if someone is alive or not include less quantified approaches like loss of higher brain functions.
Secondly, this issue is manifested in the problem of classifying what does and does not classify as "life". Like mentioned previously, we all can agree that humans should fit under the classification of life, and that rocks should not. But what about a virus?
Life as we know it is comprised of cells, the basic building block of (at the very least) the majority of what we call life. These cells range in size, but are generally in the 200 nanometer ballpark. Viruses (and the new "nanobes" in the article mentioned in the beginning) are many times smaller than this, and are not comprised of the same building blocks. Many people use this to claim that they should not count as life, but on the other hand, they do still have DNA. I for one feel reluctant to call something with its own DNA "not life".
Viruses (which btw, should really be pluralized as "Virii") also seem to exhibit many of the qualities that we typically associate with living things, with the notable exception of needing a host to sustain itself. Making it a good topic for debate, indeed.
Lastly, are the implementation details important to being classified as life or not? Put it this way: All life as we know it is "carbon based", but why can't life be accomplished in another way? If we met an alien in a flying saucer which was not carbon based, surely we wouldn't classify them along with rocks as being "not alive" right?
Well, then why should robots be considered "not alive"? If you were to meet Data from Star Trek, would you classify him as alive, or not?
To begin actual debate, I hold the opinion that carbon chauvinism is silly and that a sufficiently sophisticated robot should certainly be classified as alive in a way no different than a human. This would stem from a classification of life based not on what it is made of, but what characteristics and behaviors they exhibit.