On Computers

Reference
Title: The Complete Works of Aristotle
Author: Aristotle

Summary
While some initial reading suggests that Aristotle is only tenuously cemented as the author of this work, this summary and discussion will assume that he was the author. Aristotle starts the article with a characterization of the physical attributes and classification of plants, and contrasts some of these attributes to humans. This leads into his argument regarding plants being alive and potentially having souls. The article also contains a large amount of information regarding plants that is less relevant from a philosophical stand point.

Discussion
Personally I am not particularly interested in the soul argument, as I am not religious. It is sufficient to say that I doubt people have souls. I see the prime difference between this article and the Chinese Room argument as dealing with life as opposed to intelligence. This would seem to imply that you could have one without the other, but I don't think this is strictly true. Certainly every form of life we consider to be living has some type of rudimentary intelligence, even if this is just the nucleus in a cell. Viruses, for example, are not considered living, but they also lack this element in their structure. From this we can infer that intelligence is a requirement for life, but this says nothing about life being a requirement for intelligence. Unfortunately we have little to go on in this regard, and the only thing to broach the subject would be AI.

The four major requirements for life are reproduction, reaction to environment, metabolism, and growth. Plants meet all of these requirements. A computer meets only one of them, unless you consider machine learning to be a form of growth. In an abstract sense, you could also consider that the transfer of power throughout a computers system constitutes a metabolism. This really leaves physical growth and reproduction as the main landmarks computers must cross to be considering living. While it is certainly less than definitive if computers have truly reach human-like intelligence, I do think it would be difficult to argue that they are not at least intelligent in some way.

To solve the reproduction and growth issues regarding computers, perhaps it is more interesting to consider a program within a computer. A program can easily grow or reproduce. The issues in this case have more to do with metabolism, although in a very abstract sense perhaps you could consider the shifting of bits within a programs memory space to be a sort of metabolism. Unfortunately a program still cannot react with its environment without the aid of hardware that it cannot reproduce. From this I conclude that the only circumstance in which we could consider a program alive would be in a purely virtual world, and the program would only be alive in that contex


Picture courtesy of google image search, from the movie Artifical Intelligence.