I guess we should get the obligatory worldview statements out of the way because I know that you and I have a difference which cannot be broached.
This discussion started when Pinker’s views were brought to the table. His premise is that “the mind is what the brain does.” My worldview is to the contrary, that the mind (consciousness, soul, spirit) is non-temporal, non-spatial and non-corporeal.
I suspect your worldview is much closer to, if not the same as, Pinkers and thus in your view there would be no functional difference between the simulation and the “real thing”. As the creator of the simulation you would know the difference between yourself and “it” – though in your worldview, it and you are equivalent.
In my worldview, there will never be a simulation which can equal tortoise and the “real” tortoise and I will never cease to exist, but your simulated tortoise would eventually no longer exist.
The best answers to the question revolve around the very point you raise, ”What does “alive” really mean, beyond being an arbitrary set of properties that a machine may or may not have?”
In the above article and a lot of others I’ve been reading these past few years, it is the information itself that sets a living entity apart from a non-living entity. A rock has no genetic code (information content) and does not communicate successfully among its members or with its environment or reproduce its information content (if it had any). Animals do. Ditto for plants, bacteria, viruses. Self-awareness is a non-issue by these definitions.
So if you were to create a strong A.I. device that has information content and which reproduces its information content and which communicates among its members and its environment – whether or not it is self-aware – it would be alive by that definition even though it did not come to be by an involuntary process.
Obviously, in my worldview the questions of "What is Life?" and "What is Mind?" are not the same.
But both subjects are quite interesting to me and I would love to hear your thoughts or definitions.
I've been missing out on a great discussion! WRT the above italics, quoting tortoise: What does "alive" really mean? A-G, I think you are correct to observe the physicists and information scientists are more interested in this problem than (oddly enough) the biologists.
Wolfhart Pannenberg, in his outstanding Towards a Theology of Nature proposes a definition which rests on the field nature of the world. His key idea is the self-transcendence of all living beings is their most essential quality or characteristic. This, he maintains, is what separates living organisms from inorganic structures of whatever degree of complexity.
To be alive and to sustain life, an organism must counteract the law of entropy. If entropy is not counteracted, the organism will soon enough achieve the condition of "heat death." I.e., its life functions will cease.
As Pannenberg sees it, “the temporal self-transcendence of every living being is a specific phenomenon of organic life that separates it from inorganic structures.” This concept seems to subsume all of theoretical biologist Ervin Bauer’s life criteria: strong spontaneity, strong responsiveness, regulation from a global level (global “self-governance”). Indeed, it seems to me the idea of self-transcendence subsumes all these criteria, and places them into dynamic relations with each other. The ability to process information is implicit in the idea of self-transcendence.
Pannenberg also suggests that living creatures are categorically different than inorganic systems by virtue of the fact that they live “ecstatically,” that is, from outside or beyond themselves.
He writes, “An organism lives ‘in’ its environment. It not only needs and actively occupies a territory but it turns it into a means for its self-realization, it nourishes itself on its environment. In this sense, every organism lives beyond itself. Again it becomes evident that life is essentially ecstatic: it takes place in the environment of the organism much more than in itself….
“It would hardly be defensible of course to maintain that an organism is created by its environment, although an appropriate environment is a necessary condition for its existence. But there is still another aspect of its living beyond itself: by turning its environment into the place and means of its life, the organism relates itself at the same time to its own future and, more precisely, to a future of its own transformation. This is true of every act of self-creation and nourishing and developing itself, by regenerating and reproducing its life. By its drives an animal is related to, although not necessarily aware of, its individual future and to the future of its species.”
Self-transcendence is what acts against the law of entropy, just as Bauer conceives of the function of his life principle. Pannenberg is a field theorist; self-transcendence is manifested in an energy field which, when you boil it all down, is ultimately “responsible” for the creation of the life of individual organisms.
I thought these were fascinating ideas. I can imagine the living organism as a “self-transcendent” and “ecstatic,” given the field structure of nature. "Ecstatic" basically means the ability to move from a present state to a new state necessary to the preservation and maintenance of life (e.g., countering the effects of entropy, etc.). As “life criteria,” these ideas seem sound to me.
Thus it appears that life is in no way "arbitrary," but astonishingly dynamic, interconnected with environment, and sensitively able to govern the life process on a global basis. People who are interested in building "thinking machines" have got their work cut out for them. JMHO, FWIW.