[soloist11]

> Formal theories and physical manufacturability are two different things

Yes, two different things are two different things. I did not equate them but made the claim that a sequence of operations to construct a chip factory can be specified formally/symbolically and passed on to others who are proficient in interpreting the symbols and executing the instructions for constructing the object corresponding to the symbols. There is no such formal theory for ecology and the biosphere. There is no sequence of operations specified formally/symbolically for reconstructing the biosphere and emergent phenomenon like living organisms.

[skissane]

Synthetic biologists are researching how to construct basic unicellular lifeforms artificially. The “holy grail” of synthetic biology is we have a computer file describing DNA sequences, protein sequences, etc, and then we feed that into some kind of bioelectrochemical device, and it produces an actual living microbe from raw chemicals. We aren’t there yet, although they’ve come a long way, but there is still a long way to go. Still, there is no reason in principle why that technology couldn’t be developed - a microbe is just a complex chemical system, and there is no reason in principle why it could not be artificially synthesised out of a computer data file. And yet, if some day we achieve that (I expect we will eventually), we’d actually have the “sequence of operations specified formally/symbolically for reconstructing [microbial] life”. And once we can do it for a microbe, doing it for a macroscopic multicellular organism is just a matter of “scaling it up” - of course in practice that would be a momentous, maybe even intractable task, but in theory its just doing the same thing on a bigger scale. Just like how, factorising a ten digit number isn’t fundamentally different from factorising a trillion digit number, although the first is trivial and the second is likely to forever be infeasible in practice. Practically a very different thing, but formally exactly the same thing

[soloist11]

You'll have to discuss these matters with computationalists. I'm not an expert in synthetic biology but from what I've seen their initial stock always consists of existing biological matter and viral recombinators which are often produced in vats full of pre-existing living organisms like e. coli.

[skissane]

> You'll have to discuss these matters with computationalists.

One doesn’t have to be a “computationalist” to believe that AIs have consciousness or intentionality. Consider panpsychism, according to which all physical matter (from quarks and leptons to stars and galaxies) possesses consciousness and intentionality, even if only in a rudimentary form. Obviously humans possess it in a much more developed form, but the consciousness and intentionality of a human differs from that of an electron only in degree not in essence. Coming to physical computers running AIs, given they (at times) can give a passable simulation of human consciousness and intentionality, it is plausible their consciousness and intentionality is much closer to that of a human that to that of an electron. Do I personally believe this is true? No. But that’s not the point - the point is you don’t have to be a computationalist to believe that AIs have (or might have) consciousness and intentionality, so even if your arguments against computationalism are correct (and while I’m no computationalist myself, I don’t view your arguments against it as strong), you still haven’t demonstrated they don’t/can’t have them. In my opinion, the most defensible conclusion regarding whether AIs have or could have consciousness/intentionality is one of agnosticism - nobody really knows, and anyone who thinks they know is probably mistaken

> I'm not an expert in synthetic biology but from what I've seen their initial stock always consists of existing biological matter and viral recombinators which are often produced in vats full of pre-existing living organisms like e. coli.

I think what you are saying is roughly right as to the current state of the discipline. But cellular life is just a complex chemical system, and there is no reason in principle why we couldn’t assemble it from scratch out of non-living components (such as a set of simple feedstock chemicals produced in chemical plants using non-biological processes). We don’t have the technology to do that yet but there is no reason in principle why we couldn’t eventually develop it. If you believe in abiogenesis, biological life was produced out of lifeless chemicals through random processes, and there is no reason in principle why we wouldn’t be able to repeat that in a laboratory, except that (one expects) by guiding the process instead of leaving it purely random, one might execute it in a human-scale timeframe, instead of the many millions of years it likely actually took.

That’s the thing - if abiogenesis is true, there is no reason in principle why humans couldn’t artificially synthesise genuinely living things - at least primitive microbial life - out of simple chemical compounds (water, ammonia, methane, etc) - without relying on any non-human lifeforms in the process. Your claims that there is some kind of hard boundary of “irreducible complexity” between the biological and the inorganic only make sense given a framework that rejects abiogenesis (such as theistic creationism)