23-October-2008, 08:55 PM
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Order of Kilopi
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Join Date: Nov 2001
Location: Boston
Posts: 3,482
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Ilya
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Love this paragraph:
Quote:
You don't define life by listing the things it's got (or doesn’t have); you define it by describing what it is. And the best definition I've encountered was put forth by Dawkins a couple of decades ago: Life is information shaped by natural selection.
Of course, some would object that this would force us to describe computer viruses as literal life forms. Not necessarily. "Natural selection" implies more than reproduction; it implies heritable copy errors, selection filters, and so on. A computer virus is not alive if someone has to keep rewriting the [bad word removed] to account for new countermeasures; it is alive, I would argue, if its lineage evolves over time without explicit human intervention. So, yes; in principle, I have no trouble describing electronic entities as literal life forms.
I'm not even being particularly radical in this approach. For years now, top-of-the-line scientific journals have been publishing papers which explicitly treat A-life as a legitimate subset of the real thing.
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Fiction has to be plausible. Reality is under no such constraint.
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