> [!tldr] Science doesn't have a clear & concise definition of "life" or "consciousness" What does it mean for something to be "alive"? Or to be "conscious"? There isn't a clear definition that we can use to cleanly delineate "life" from "not living". Essentially every quality we might think of as proof of "life" could be ascribed to things that we traditionally don't consider "alive". | Evidence of "life" | Things that aren't alive that do that | | ------------------------------------- | --------------------------------------------------- | | Goal seeking | Computer algorithms | | Responding to your environment | Robots like autonomous drones | | Metabolizing energy to sustain itself | Computers themselves take in power to do their work | | Self-replication | Computer viruses. AI that can code new AI. | Harari suggests [[There's a difference between intelligence and consciousness]]. Intelligence is the ability to think. Consciousness is the ability to *experience*. The issues that consciousness, too, is a very tricky thing to explicitly identify. At what point between "amoeba" and "human" does the threshold of "conscious being" exist? **My hot take:** Consciousness seems (to me) like an [[Emergent Behavior]] of sufficiently complex systems. This idea, unfortunately, doesn't make it any easier to define. At what point does a complex system "emerge" consciousness? No clue. It could be quite possible that there exists a soul, outside of the plane that which we can measure. And [[Measurement is the basis of science.]] **** # More ## Source - my understanding - influenced by [[Nexus]]