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That outlook is a product of the way you look at the data, not the data itself. How are laptops not reproducing? If you looked at the population of laptops in the world when they were first introduced - and then tracked them through the years, they have clearly started reproducing. They even evolved! The basic shape stays the same, but they are clear evolutionary trends, like the taxonomy, outwinning the poor designs, branches of evolutionary traits etc! Of course you can choose to look at the people that are building them, but how do you actually know that laptops are not "parasites" for example? Or a symbiotic life form like dogs? Yes, individual humans might take specific actions for building specific laptops, but so what, we take actions to raise and walk dogs also. Do we as humans really have a choice of stopping producing laptops? If not, couldn't it be just as easily seen that laptops actually use us to reproduce? Like flowers use bees to reproduce? You don't see flowers as being less alive because bees are ultimately required for them to reproduce? Sure, one might need to talk more about the design of a laptop, the basic idea of a computer in a portable interface with certain features - not any individual physical laptop as being alive. But why not? People are surely not only alive in a physical sense. Many of the physical differences and transformations actually don't make much difference. It's the inherent internal something (entity? information? idea? soul?) that is more alive than the physical body itself. The point is, "property of self replicators in their competition for life and reproduction" - is not a very good metric for consciousness. Many people don't see it as coming from the data itself, and more being a predetermined paradigm or outlook on the world, which someone already comes in with, when they look at the data. When someone with another outlook (for example that consciousness actually uses the physical world, including the reproduction cycle) to its own goals, not the other way around - then the data starts supportnig that too. It's all about how to look at it. |