The Meaning of Life
“42” according to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is the answer, to Life, the Universe and Everything. I believe the author Douglas Adams pondered for some time before deciding that 42 would be the most innocuous number he could come up with. But how would we define the term “Life” …..
Life could be described as:-
An innate property attributed to complex naturally occurring chemical structures capable of acquiring and utilising resources from their environment and employing them for growth, self replication and repair. Each replicable chemical structure, or organism, is therefore an open system that will process raw materials to harvest energy and also reduce its own entropy by expulsion of entropy, heat and performing some form of work. For example the construction of a complex molecule from a sequence of simpler ones.
Even this is a rather clumsy simplification. I have framed it as generically as I could, but the prolific use of the term spans a number of paradigms.
For example, must an entity be naturally occurring to have life? Does it need to be able to self replicate? If an individual is unfortunate enough to lose this ability, of even be created without it, it is not therefore dead.
Viruses can, and do, self replicate, but are not really considered to be alive, although I would suggest that they could be regarded as marking at least one ‘boundary’ of the overall definition.
What about self-awareness? We also couple the term ‘Life’ with our own awareness of our own condition, which we then refer to as our ‘Life’. If self awareness is a viable property of a physical structure, (e.g. a human brain), then it is reasonable to assume that the property could be equally supported by some form of synthetic construct. If a structure was self-aware, would we not also consider it to be alive.
It is only relatively recently than self awareness has been acknowledged as being generally present in most higher life forms, as opposed to being a god given gift reserved exclusively for mankind.
That fact that we currently don’t really fully understand how this occurs is irrelevant. It occurs, and so it is possible. If a synthetically constructed entity achieved self awareness, we would tend to regard it as being ‘alive’, because it has a ‘life’, and should therefore be granted equal moral standing and writes as other living things.
I should point out that this is not the same as AI (Artificial Intelligence). There are a number of AI systems currently available, and more in development. But these are really just sophisticated machine interfaces. They behave in an intelligent way because they are programmed to. But they are just complicated pattern matching and data searching algorithms designed to recognise requests, and find an acceptable response.
Machine Intelligence is something quite different. This is where a system has be designed to learn, by trial and error, the appropriate responses to its inputs. These systems are generally based on neural networks, which are designed to model the behaviour of neurons in a brain. This would be the route towards synthetic self awareness.
Currently the number of neurons used is relatively tiny, compared to the billions that make up a human brain. I do think, however, that we should consider the morality of expanding such technology too far until we are sure we do understand the nature of our own consciousness. It’s not that I believe that the machines would rise up and take over the world (Skynet), or that we would necessarily be out-evolved by our own creations (Frankenstein). More likely that we might in our ignorance cause great suffering by the inadvertent creation of a disembodied sentient synthetic brain.
This is basically Marvin from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, so I guess Douglas Adams was right. 42.