[Alamo-Girl]

Thank you so much for your reply!

If you arbitrarily exclude viruses from the set of living things, you can make a more convincing argument that "artificial" phenomena are nonliving.

As far as I'm concerned, everything is on the table - including artificial life. And I'd hate to see a definition which was kluged to get the desired result.

I personally find this area of discussion interesting only when the parties to the discussion mutually agree that the problem is unsolvable with the current state of knowledge.

I see this more as a search for a definition rather than trying to solve a problem - the objective being to communicate better amongst ourselves. IMHO, the definition would be helpful in discussing evolution, abiogenesis, artificial intelligence, cosmology, exobiology and quantum field theory.

It is my opinion that artificial entities will become increasingly complex with time and further erode the perceptual boundary between living and nonliving.

Evidently you do not consider artificial "life" to be alive. I suspect this may be the most frequent reaction - so I wonder again if the word "life" ought to always be qualified one way or the other by cause, natural v artificial.

[js1138]

Evidently you do not consider artificial "life" to be alive.

I think any definition of life, no matter how carefully considered, will contain some arbitrary elements. I'm willing to consider an artificially intelligent entity alive, even if it can't self-replicate, provided its behavior is sufficiently interesting. I've never met a human who could self-replicate, but if one existed in complete isolation I would consider him/her to be alive.