Now, I'm a shallow sort of guy, and I read Shirow's work mainly for the hot anime chicks, but in GitS (as it is known) he does raise some important questions. In a not so distant future where people are often part machine and part computer, what does it mean to be human?

And beyond that, what does it mean to be a thinking being, and what does it mean to be alive? As a mechanistic atheist engineer, Den Beste finds these questions important, and difficult, and troubling.

I'm also a mechanistic atheist engineer* and I also find these questions important - but not difficult or troubling. That's because I've worked out what the answers are. And that's because I've argued the point with a number of people who aren't mechanistic atheist engineers. Of course, they think I'm wrong, and I think they're crazy, but that's not the main point here.

Den Beste asks, Is a virus alive?, and confesses he doesn't know. To me there is one obvious, clear, simple, and comprehensive answer, and it is sort of.

A virus is sort of alive. For any useful definition of life, salt, for example, pure sodium chloride, or, say, hydrogen gas in its ground state, are not alive. For any useful definition of life, people, cows, cats** and fish are alive.

I'm quite comfortable with saying that amoebas are alive, and bacteria too. Individual isolated proteins aren't alive, not really. And viruses are sort of alive.

It's the argument from utility really; as Den Beste himself has put it, It is what it does. Does a virus act like life? Well, it does, sort of. So it is sort of alive.

Some people don't like this; they want a yes/no answer, a knife-edge division between life and unlife. To them, I say: Tough. Neither life nor the Universe owes you an easy answer. Why should life be a binary property, any more than, for example, intelligence, or complexity?

The same argument also solves*** the even trickier questions of the conscious mind. Is there actually an identifiable self with continuity of existence which is typing these words? asks the engineer. Well, yes, there is. In the same sense that the surface of this table is solid, Steven Den Beste is a real, identifiable, continuous entity.

Of course, at an atomic and subatomic scale the table is mostly empty space. And at a low enough level, consciousness is just Physics. But that doesn't matter, because it still works. This keyboard is not going to fall through the table, and the fact that it is a big blob of atoms doing the thinking in my head does not contradict Descartes' Cogito ergo sum.

* Well, more or less. I'm a computer programmer, so I have aspirations towards engineering, and try to apply the principles of engineering to my craft.
** Most cats. Not Schroedinger's, and not dead ones.
*** For a sufficiently small value of "solves".

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:39 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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