LogFAQs > #903255835

bulbinking posted...

Until we can create from scratch the biochemical componants to form a viable humam sperm and zygote you cannot claiim that humans make more humans.

As I type this, I am making new sperm out of the digested components of last night's dinner. I'm using my testicles and not my hands to do so, and it doesn't require any sort of deliberate, conscious input, but I - a human - am making those sperm myself. To create a baby, I - a human - would have to deliver those sperm to the same place as a human egg, which would then have to be implanted inside a human uterus, at which point a human female would provide the necessary raw materials (which she will have to acquire and digest herself) for that human to assemble itself inside her.

Every step in that process requires the action of one of more humans. One of those actions even has to be deliberate and conscious, without considering the deliberate and conscious effort needed to provided the molecular components needed. Given the definition of "artificial" (made or produced by human beings), can this baby that was produced entirely by humans not be considered artificial?

bulbinking posted...

Humans do behave predictably.

Broadly? Yes. Narrowly? Not so much. The neurological processes involved in very specific decisions are generally too complex to follow directly, courtesy of the wide range of stimuli involved in reaching decisions. Psychology as a whole does not have the information necessary to predict that I would have sweet & sour chicken for lunch today, even if it could easily have the information necessary to predict that I will eat lunch. Predicting that would require impractically close scrutiny of my life, what was in my fridge, and how much time I had to prepare today's lunch.

Similarly, you can broadly predict what a neural network will do. If programmed to, say, come up with names for paint colours (actual experiment with hilarious results, I recommend looking it up), you can predict that it will come up with names that resemble words and associate them with RGB values. It's a lot harder, however, to predict what names it will come up with and which RGB values it will associate with them. The algorithms are there and can be followed, but given the size of the data set used as stimuli, predicting the outcomes is very difficult and requires paying very close attention to those stimuli.

bulbinking posted...

Unless we want to call viruses alive too.

There are many who would. They act very much like living things, growing and reproducing and adapting and responding to their environments. They're made of many of the same things as cells, with some even having cell membranes. The big sticking point with viruses is their lack of metabolism, since they do not consume energy to maintain themselves. Whether or not that should be enough to disqualify them, though, is very much debatable, and the biological community is fairly split on that.

That distinction, however, is fairly academic, since the only real reason to worry about whether or not they're alive is to figure out how to kill them if necessary (which medicine is able to do), and biologists can study them even if their field title could technically preclude that.
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