Comment on Could machines develop consciousness just like we did?

• idiomaddict@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  You’re not wrong, but the definition of life that I learned in science class includes things like: homeostasis, response to stimuli, reproduction, metabolism, cell growth, adaptation, cell signaling, and death. Rivers adapt, respond to stimuli, and can “die”; maybe reproduce, achieve homeostasis, and metabolize; but don’t have cells. Crystals reproduce and maybe metabolize, but not the rest.

  That’s a faulty definition, because it doesn’t clearly define viruses as alive or not alive, but it’s still useful, because the things that we can categorize as alive (or sometimes alive, in the case of viruses) under it share a lot of common characteristics that make sense to study together.

  Rivers and crystals have some of these characteristics, but so does everything in nature- a star metabolizes and dies, a planet achieves homeostasis and responds to stimuli, and asteroids traveling fast enough can “reproduce” by hitting another stellar object hard enough to break one or both of them into smaller pieces. Including everything in the natural world under the umbrella of life doesn’t help us understand the world around us better according to our current understanding of the universe.

  I think it’s impossible for us to determine truth, and the best we can do is an approximate theory that holds up with new information. Even when we know our model is untrue (like how we know classifying species the way we do is generally too rigid, or the fact that there’s no such thing as a fish), we can still gather information better under that model than without it.

  Or so we think, maybe we’d have a much clearer understanding of the world if carcinology fell under entomology instead of marine biology.

  As for consciousness, that’s even harder to define.

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