I'm only working with what you've given me thus far. You said structure was what matters. So, let's look at the structure of what you eat and see if it's really less "complex" than you are. I'm betting you don't content yourself with protein gruel, and hence, it isn't. Of course, your steak is (we hope) no longer "alive" - it's function is now to be food for something else. Someday you and I will be functionally equivalent to the steak, in that respect ;)
I guess you don't know what isomorphism is. Look it up then you'll understand the relationship of structure and function in this context.
I'm familiar with it, in both the biological and mathematical senses. You said structure matters, so 100,000,000 identical transistors didn't form a complex, living whole - but then, neither do 100,000,000 million structurally identical people. Then you said function matters, so I pointed out that the Krebs cycle and a burning log were functionally equivalent. Now you appear to be saying that if we define something as alive, and find something both structurally and functionally similar, we can call that alive as well. But you said that people aren't functionally the same, or functionally similar enough, anyway - so even though I am alive, and you appear to be structurally similar, I can't say that you're alive by this process you seem to be developing.
Look, I'm not really pursuing all this as a serious argument - I'm merely suggesting that this whole "alive" versus "not alive" thing is a bit more complex than it might appear to be at first blush...
True, there is some similarity, but isn't it the case that ordinary combustion is a far simpler process than the citric acid cycle? One obvious dissimilarity is that the latter involves a cycle and the former does not. And aren't there some ten steps in the cycle while combustion is one step that reacts a heated fuel and oxygen?
Agreed. But then we have to ask ourselves, what is this magic level of complexity, above which something is "alive", and below which, it is not? How complex is complex enough to be alive?
By the time it gets to the gut, isn't that pretty much what it is? In fact we need bacteria to break stuff down to the point that it can be used by our bodies.
I'm merely suggesting that this whole "alive" versus "not alive" thing is a bit more complex than it might appear to be at first blush... How complex is complex enough to be alive?
Agreed, alive vs. not alive isn't as simple as just a question of complexity if you'll excuse the pun. But we shouldn't consider it just a question of biology either. There is a structure (actually several) to life independent of any given realization.
The question of how complex is interesting. I recall reading that a theoretical minimal cellular genome would need some hundreds of genes. Granted that some cellular structure is also required, but even so that's not very complex.
On the flip side, there may be a maximal complexity to life. Beyond a certain level of complexity, systems would appear patternless to us, one could justifiably call them random. I don't think we'd consider such a thing alive.
But you said that people aren't functionally the same ... so even though I am alive, and you appear to be structurally similar, I can't say that you're alive by this process you seem to be developing.
I don't think I'm being that unclear. In the context of IBM employment, people are different in essential ways - they do different things, have different skills. This is completely unrelated to comparing them structurally as living organisms, then they are essentially the same - heart maps to heart, lung to lung, brain to brain and so on. So in comparing IBM to a CPU, it's the differences between people that count, not their similarities. And in that context, the people and other components of IBM come together in far more and more complex ways than the transistors and lines on a silicon chip.