| Using my Apple and Orange analogy, I would note that your first paragraph can be summarized as follows:
“But what if the Apple someday turned into an Orange? Wouldn’t you then concede it is an Orange?”
That’s not a helpful question as it glosses over the crux of the matter; namely, there is no mechanisms described or suggested whereby an Apple is ever capable of becoming an Orange. Your second paragraph states the converse: “An Orange, after all, is really just a sophisticate Apple... they’re basically the same.”
Once again, it is obvious and not fairly deniable that they are not. No machine is alive. >Given that a person is composed of proteins, enzymes and other such relatively simple parts which function in a mechanistic fashion... Here you are equating living creatures to machines to support your notion that machines are equivalent to living creatures. You’re not getting anywhwhere. Moreover, an honest rereading of the comment, particularly the bit about “relatively simple parts”, should be a red-flag. Transistors and dioses and resistors are “relatively simple parts.” There is nothing simple about the components of living creatures... the scale of complexity of a protein is so far beyond any machine ever made that the analogy is just, well, laughable. That being said, how would I personally define the categories between animate and inanimate? Like this: living systems are characetriZed by becoming MORE complex at lower scales. The opposite is true of inanimate systems. Example: The behavior of an ant is easy to model. The behavior of one of the systems that make up the ant — say his brain — is more difficult to model. And, a single cell? far more complex than the ant en toto. And the molecular machinery in the cell? Even more complex. The deeper down you go, the more complicated. Inanimate objects are different. A computer is complex. An IC less so. A single transistor even less so. Etc. It gets simpler as you take it apart. |
Support your assertion, please. The behaviour of ants is actually quite complex and has yet to be entirely modelled and characteriSed in full detail. In fact, it's still an area of active study.