On 18 Jan 2010, at 16:35, John Mikes wrote:
Is a universal mchine 'live'?
I would say yes, despite the concrete artificial one still needs humans in its reproduction cycle. But we need plants and bacteria. I think that all machines, including houses and garden are alive in that sense. Cigarets are alive. They have a a way to reproduce. Universal machine are alive and can be conscious.
If we define "artificial" by "introduced by humans", we can see that the difference between artificial and natural is ... artificial (and thus natural!). Jacques Lafitte wrote in 1911 (published in 1931) a book where he describes the rise of machines and technology as a collateral living processes.
Only for Löbian machine, like you, me, but also Peano Arithmetic and ZF , I would say I am pretty sure that they are reflexively conscious like us. Despite they have no lived experiences at all. (Well, they have our experiences, in a sense. We are their experiences).
Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
-- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
