Re: Free-will, interdependence

Dan's post reminds me of a Star Trek episode where Data's rights ware put "on trial" such that the issue became proving whether or not Data was ALIVE, in the same sense a biologically created, natural organism is alive. For those who never watched Star Trek, the character of Data is an artificial organism, an android who has achieved the level of complexity such that he is alive, and he also is sentient, possessing an equally artificial (in creation) brain of sufficient complexity that he has achieved true consciousness. (Incidentally, my father was my Star Trek watching companion, even from a distance!) During the trial, it was demonstrated that Data had an "off button", which you can use to make him completely unconscious and inert, but not dead. This was held up as proof that Data was not alive and the issue was not addressed very will in the episode. I was frustrated because I can see a counter argument that would have been perfect to rebut that seeming "truth": All biological organisms have a whole series of "off buttons", if you choose to define them that way. A blow to the back of the human head where it joins the neck is quite capable of rendering any living human as unconscious and inert as Data was after Riker hit the "off button", for example. Therefore, the fact that you could unplug a computer and turn it off doesn't really prove that whatever "intelligence" we can creat artificially is less than a human's. Human beings are as dependent on oxygen as any computer is on electricity.

I wonder if it will be possible to apply the natural laws to artificially created life forms or artificially created intelligence that might exist independently of a "body" (except perhaps the substitution; a computer network)? I believe this question was what caused so much concern in my father regarding abuse of his theories if he published any kind of "How To" manual-- or anything that might be used as one. The artificially created versions won't have an evolutionary foundation, which may well cause an entirely new kind of interaction, or causal framework, to form. Different doesn't always mean "worse", but there are no guarantees...

Frankly, this divergence from an evolutionary process is something that I believe is already happening with humanity-- Our species is using our intelligence to subvert natural evolutionary processes-- both in our own physiology and in myriad other organisms we USE for some purpose of our choosing-- in favor of new, artificial evolutionary processes. It's either really difficult or truly impossible to predict what that might mean down the road.