To the human prion topology - yes. But that’s not what I read your previous post as saying.
There may be more than one malignant form. IDK, I haven’t read that much on the subject that the issue would have come up. Not only that, getting the 3 dimensional structure for most proteins is challenging at best especially when one considers that many have at least a portion of their structure that is intrinsically disordered.
Well, no. Using any standard dictionary definition of growth.
It would require very little time to build a robot that picked up loose Lego blocks and stuck them to its own body.
We have countless examples of insects which never interact with other member of their own species, yet all carry out their functions identically to every other member of their species. So in whats sense are those insects not “pre-programmed from another source”? They clearly are not *learning *their behaviour. because it is invariable across the species in the absence of any interaction.
Or, to put it another way, in what sense is the uploaded programming of my Lego robot not an inherent code and predetermined structure toward which it grows?
You can’t have it both ways. Either insect movement is pre-programmed from another source, or the movement if a robot is not pre-programmed from another source
This is precisely why these simplistic definitions of life invariably fail: it’s trivially easy to build “life” to simple defiinitions using modern technology.
So why the quotes? Why do we not simply say we’ve created life using modern technology? What’s the missing factor? Whatever motivates the quotes is what life is, no?
In the example of robotics, the quotes are generally used because we view life as spontaneous, not designed. If an external source programmed insects, we have no evidence of that. We do have evidence that a robot is assembled and programmed by either a person or by a machine which was assembled and programmed by a person or a machine descended from one assembled and programmed by a person.
If we ever find actual evidence of Intelligent Design, than I’d claim that the discovery would mean two things, philosophically: it would mean that we are in fact robots - that is, designed, assembled and programed, not spontaneously formed by chance - and it would mean that the Designer is no more powerful than we are, merely ahead of us on the technological timeline.
Not really. Like pornography, we know life when we see it. And everybody knows that a $15 toy is not alive. Saying that it is alive because it meets some individual’s overly-simplistic definition of life is about as valid as constructing an equally simplistic definition of “human”, and claiming that the chicken is human. It’s ridiculous because we all know that the robot is clearly not alive and that a chicken is not a man, and thus the defintions are flawed.
You can see this in BlueMit11’s struggles to separate out the robot using nebulous terms like “inherent code” and “predetermined structure”. He knows, as do you and I, that a robot is not alive. Just because you define a tail as a leg, that doesn’t mean that a dog has 5 legs, and just because you define life as something that moves and grows, that doesn’t make a cheap to alive.
Any usable definition of life is going to be complicated, because life is complicated. The idea that we should broaden the definition of life to include fire and toy robots in order to keep the definition simple is putting the cart before the horse.
Well, no. I don’t subscribe to that, and I have no evidence that anybody else does. It would be fairly trivial to produce self-assembling robots, for example. It would be fairly simple using modern technology to build a factory that builds robots that builds robot factories. Despite the resulting robots being “spontaneous” and not “self assembled”, I doubt that anybody would be more inclined to consider them alive. They would still be $15 toy robots.
And conversely, if we did discover that the first life on Earth was built by some ancient race, we wouldn’t consider ourselves or chickens any less alive or any less “spontaneous” or “self assembled”.
And do you really think we would then stop thinking of ourselves as being alive? Or that we would start thinking of lawnmowers as being alive? Because if you agree that this wouldn’t occur, then you understand why “spontaneous” and “self assembly” are not, by themselves, useful defining features.
The definition of life has been debated for at least 4 millennia, and nobody has come up with a satisfactory one yet. But to me it seems like there are a few absolutely essential criteria.
One is an entropy reversal of a large magnitude. A robot sticking Lego blocks to itself or a growing crystal may be a localised reversal of entropy, but the relative entropy decrease is too trivial to be considered “life” trivial.
The second is that life needs to be able to express characteristics such as growth in hostile and changing environments. While a cheap robot could certainly grow if placed on a smooth floor with pre-constructed Lego blocks made available to it, it would fail completely if placed in any natural environment, or if those blocks were being protected by the organisms that created them, the way that biological blocks are. The ability to function in a “natural” world, rather than a world deliberately and specifically constructed for it, would seem critical to any definition of life that most people would intuitively accept.
Note that none of this precludes robots from being alive, or known organisms from being some form of robot. Nor are the standards rigidly quantified (How large an entropy decrease, how well guarded must the resources be). It just means that life, as we intuitively understand it, is a complicated, self-sufficient process that happens to *encompass *growth and movement. It’s not *just *growth and movement as required by BlueMit11’s definition.
I’ve heard the “fifth leg” routine attributed to Mark Twain - how many legs does a dog have if you call the tail a leg?
I also recall his definition “a dog is that which is recognized as a dog by other dogs”. Any definition of life is just that - a definition.
Life - Pick a definition, any definition.
The problem with this is that words should mean stuff. Even if life is ill-defined, we could still expect 99% of people to agree that cheap robot is not alive, and that a rabbit is alive. So any definition that contradicts that near-universal common usage is wrong, by definition. 
If your definition does not match the understood meaning of a word then it’s not, in fact, a definition at all. Pick a definition, any definition is not just unsatisfactory, it’s useless. I can’t just pick a definition of life that means “Chocolate cupcake” and expect anybody to understand me, much less agree with me that a muffin is alive while a rabbit is not.