Quote:
Originally Posted by TGS
And if we had one would that also be a definition of life? Could there be a living thing that is not conscious, and could the be a conscious thing that is not living? There are fairly non-contentious examples of the former and slightly more contentious examples of the latter.
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Excellent point. Not many people would doubt that plants are alive, but few would consider them to possess consciousness; although for my part, I'm not sure they don't possess some rudimentary form of consciousness. There was an interesting article in
Psychology Today February 1981 issue entitled "Do Bacteria think?" The article poses the following question: "Researchers are turning up more and more evidence that these single-cell organisms are living, sensate beings whose activities can be described with such psychologically oriented terms as stimulus, response, excitation, and adaptation The new studies raise a profound question about the evolution of mind: if the simplest forms of life are capable of purposive activity, can they be said to engage in a form of thinking?"
But as to the question you posed, namely "Could there be a living thing that is not conscious, and could there be a conscious thing that is not living?", I would say "most likely" to the first part, and "I don't know" to the second. If a machine ever develops anything akin to consciousness but lacks the ability to procreate via biological means, should we consider it alive, even if the hallmark of at least the potential for biological self-replication inherent in all forms of things we currently call "alive" is lacking? Is Data, the Star-Trek android, alive?