[ SECRET POST #4478 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #4478 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 21 secrets from Secret Submission Post #641.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

What do you think, really, is the difference between electrical signals in three pounds of soggy bacon, and electrical signals in wire and silicon?

[(Anonymous)]

One is alive and one is not, I reckon, is the most obvious answer.

[(Anonymous)]

I don't think bacon is alive

[(Anonymous)]

It was.

[(Anonymous)]

How can you tell the difference? Is is that if you turn one off it immediately starts decaying and losing data, and if you turn the other off you can turn it back on will no ill-effects?

[(Anonymous)]

Sure, that's one difference. And that "data" doesn't define life - or else books are alive, and such. We know organic life is life. If robots are alive, then so are, indeed, toasters, or for that matter, rocks and minerals.

[(Anonymous)]

So... we know it's alive... so it's alive. And if we don't know it's alive, it's not alive.

You're not as good at this philosophy thing as you perhaps imagine.

[(Anonymous)]

How can you tell the difference? Is it that if you turn one off it immediately starts decaying and losing data, and if you turn the other off you can turn it back on with no ill-effects?

[(Anonymous)]

Why does there have to be a relationship between consciousness / subjectivity / sapience / moral personhood (whatever you want to call it) and organic life? If humans are physical organisms whose existence can be explained through material means, it follows that consciousness is a property of certain kinds of physical structures, and so there's no reason - in principle - that consciousness would necessarily be limited to one specific kind of physical structure. And non-material explanations of human consciousness run into other issues.

[(Anonymous)]

Organic life is made of living cells, though. And while I'm all for animistic musings of some kind of consciousness existing in all matter, where's the line with robots? I'm willing to accept that tiny animals are alive - insects, what have you. Aren't toasters the insects of robots? Any argument that robots have "life" suggests that all electronics have life, and to talk of materials basically means everything in the universe is alive in some way. Which is fine, spiritually speaking, but a pretty useless conversation to have in actuality. To speak in effective terms, an android, like a toaster, doesn't represent any kind of life as we know it or in a way that has tangible meaning.

[(Anonymous)]

But let's set aside the question of whether it's "alive". The question I want to ask is, can an entity have subjectivity, consciousness, sapience, etc - the qualities that generally go to make up personhood - even if that entity is not an organic life form?

And I see no reason, in principle, why that couldn't be the case. I'm not saying any actually existing machine has those qualities, but there's no fundamental philosophical reason a sufficiently advanced machine wouldn't be capable of having them.