Good morning, John. Do you know what life is? This question has always fascinated me.
I mean, at first, it seems like kind of a simple question. Like, you're not dead, you're
alive. Pretty big difference there. When you're dead, you're stinky, you're decomposing, you
turn--and you stop moving. It's pretty--it's pretty clear.
But if you think about it for a long time, it's not whether or not I'm alive or dead,
it's whether or not a virus is ever alive or whether or not a computer virus is ever
alive. What about Johnny 5 and those little things from Batteries Not Included? And if
you weren't alive in the 80s, what about GLaDOS?
If we don't have the definition, how will we know when we've created something that's
alive? And does it really matter and is this all just pseudo-intellectual navel-gazing?
Navel-gazing is a weird term. Staring into your belly? Whoa. What is that?
So when I asked on Twitter, I got some funny answers, but mostly what I got was a list
of criteria which appears to be what is being taught in schools right now. Move, respire,
sense, reproduce, excrete, and nourish. First, that is a list of criteria; it is not a definition.
Second, that list of criteria seems a little bit unnecessarily restrictive to me. Like,
Lieutenant Commander Data? If you are a Star Trek nerd, he doesn't respire, he doesn't
grow, he doesn't reproduce, but nonetheless, he is alive, he's more than alive, he's sentient.
So my personal definition--this is the one that I've come up with: life wants. If thing
x requires thing y in order to continue its existence, and thing x shows attempts to acquire
thing y, then thing x, apparently wanting thing y, is alive. A side note, if wanting
is in fact the fundamental attribute of what makes things alive, I think it goes a long
to explaining why humans never seem to stop wanting.
I mean, even if you got like twenty thing-a-mabobs, you got whozits and whatzits galore, still...
Oh, I'm about to embarass myself, aren't I? We want more!
The problem with the definition of "want" is that it's fairly easy to create a computer
program that wants something. Like, Google Search Bot, for example, wants to seek out
and search information and send it back. But does that make Google software alive?
But beyond the biological definition, my favorite definition of life is Schrödinger's. And
yes, Schrödinger, the dude with the cat. So entropy is a physical, measurable physical
quantity, quality, like mass, or heat, you know, and it's a measurement of disorganization.
As your entropy goes up, you become less organized.
My body, right here, from the strands of DNA in the cells of my feet to my delightfully
tousled mop of hair is an extremely organized sy--really organized, just tremendous amount
of organization. But the second law of thermodynamics states that entropy must, as a rule, increase,
and the disorder of the universe will forever increase.
What, then, is this? This magnificent, near-perfect, amazingly organized meat that contains me?
Schrödinger said basically, I'm paraphrasing, life is any system that continuously decreases
its own entropy using energy around it. Basically, Schrödinger took a fundamental philosophical
question and answered it with an equation. Which is just amazing.
But if life organizes itself using energy, then Schrödinger's definition kinda is just
as bad as mine when it comes to Google. Though Google no doubt was created by man, it currently,
on its own, organizes itself using the energy that it has, which is the power from the power
grid.
So, is Google alive? I'm going to break some rules here and venture a cautious yes. And
you are welcome to comment on my idiocy in the comments.
Now there are some people who say that they value all individual living organisms just
because they are alive. To those people I say mehhh. You don't really believe that.
I made a point this morning to not brush my teeth.
Yeah, how is that related?
But because I didn't brush my teeth today, there are approximately a hundred billion
living organisms in my mouth right now. The question becomes: do all those organisms have
value, and if they do, do I have a responsibility not to kill all of them? Uh, the answer is
no, they don't have value, and I don't care if they live or die, 'cause my breath's stinky.
And neither do you, at least, I hope, because you also kill billions of them every single
day. John, I will see you on Wednesday.
GLaDOS: The only thing you've managed to break so far is my heart.