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miriam_e"All that lives is bound to age and die."
Well, no. There are plenty of living things that are immortal. In fact immortality is the rule rather than the exception. Every protozoan, every bacterium, is immortal... in the sense that as long as they don't meet with an accident they can potentially live forever. If you count viruses as living then they are immortal too. I think most (all?) algae are also ageless and continue growing so long as circumstances permit. I have even been told that daffodils can live forever, if you prevent them from blooming by dutifully lopping their flower heads. One set of chromosomes in every person is destined to be immortal too -- it can be traced back in an unbroken line to the early lifeforms perhaps 600 million years ago.
Death is reserved for us; the many-celled living things.
Evolutionarily it makes sense. It lets complex creatures evolve in a changing world in order to avoid being wiped out by the next big climatic or environmental shift. We and other organisms are also engaged in a constant jostle for best positions for survival against competitors and with allies, and we need to be able to adapt to that too. If we were immortal we would have too low a breeding rate (else we would overpopulate) and the smallest change in circumstances would wipe us out. We need to turn over enough new individuals who are variable enough to let the race endure. (Racists always get it so wrong. Racial purity would mean the death of humanity. Our survival has always hinged upon variability.)
But I don't want to die. My mind feels different from the substantial world around it. And it is different. The brain is a complexly interconnected gazillion electrical elements constituting a bowl of porridge in my skull, but my mind is the set of actions performed by the brain. So, of course when my brain dies I evaporate. I don't go anywhere -- there just isn't a brain doing the action that is me anymore.
Damn!
Well, no. There are plenty of living things that are immortal. In fact immortality is the rule rather than the exception. Every protozoan, every bacterium, is immortal... in the sense that as long as they don't meet with an accident they can potentially live forever. If you count viruses as living then they are immortal too. I think most (all?) algae are also ageless and continue growing so long as circumstances permit. I have even been told that daffodils can live forever, if you prevent them from blooming by dutifully lopping their flower heads. One set of chromosomes in every person is destined to be immortal too -- it can be traced back in an unbroken line to the early lifeforms perhaps 600 million years ago.
Death is reserved for us; the many-celled living things.
Evolutionarily it makes sense. It lets complex creatures evolve in a changing world in order to avoid being wiped out by the next big climatic or environmental shift. We and other organisms are also engaged in a constant jostle for best positions for survival against competitors and with allies, and we need to be able to adapt to that too. If we were immortal we would have too low a breeding rate (else we would overpopulate) and the smallest change in circumstances would wipe us out. We need to turn over enough new individuals who are variable enough to let the race endure. (Racists always get it so wrong. Racial purity would mean the death of humanity. Our survival has always hinged upon variability.)
But I don't want to die. My mind feels different from the substantial world around it. And it is different. The brain is a complexly interconnected gazillion electrical elements constituting a bowl of porridge in my skull, but my mind is the set of actions performed by the brain. So, of course when my brain dies I evaporate. I don't go anywhere -- there just isn't a brain doing the action that is me anymore.
Damn!
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Smile
Date: 2005-03-30 04:15 am (UTC)If not... take a look.
Imagine the problem of creating an Artificial Consciousness... not just an Artificial Intelligence. :)
First Edition has mathematics, second edition has Mary Shelley quotes.
Both are good.
Re: Smile
Date: 2005-03-30 07:51 am (UTC)No I haven't. I'll have to find it.
I actually think that creating artificial consciousness will be surprisingly easy. I think consciousness is simply a natural result of certain feedback systems in any complex, self-regulating, bottom-up designed system. Bottom-up means a system built on simple systems the way Rodney Brooks' robots are built up of small independent units, and the way neural nets have emergent behavior from large collections of simple units.
Top-down systems are the rule-based systems that try to formalise logic and thought processes. I don't think they are very likely to produce consciousness -- well, one day, after we understand the actual connections that lead to consciousness, but it seems the hard way to go.
Re: Smile
Date: 2005-03-30 02:20 pm (UTC)