# Is synthetic "life," or creating living organisms in a lab, feasible?



## TheIsrafil (May 19, 2014)

Marlowe said:


> LOL. It cracks me up that you answer yes and then immediately state afterwards it's a tough question. Not for you apparently?


I wasn't answering "yes" for his question "should we do it?" I was just confirming that it is possible.


----------



## Aquamarine (Jul 24, 2011)

We have to be aware of the potential consequences before deciding whether or not to do it.


----------



## lightwing (Feb 17, 2013)

I believe that, like @Himistu said, it's impossible. The closest we can come to "creating" life is the combination of egg and sperm. All other "life" we "create" is just another more complicated and elaborate machine.

Consciousness and what makes a person "alive" are metaphysical and not something we can build in a test tube. Any "successful" attempts are likely just a modified route of doing exactly what an egg and sperm already do and not technically us "creating" anything, but rather arranging something in a different way that ends up in the same result. 
Like building a house. You can build a house by assembling the roof first on the ground and then build the walls and put the roof on top; or you can build the walls first, then build the roof on top of that. Either way, you still have the same materials ending up with the same result, the process is just different.


----------



## Death Persuades (Feb 17, 2012)

If it's possible, it will happen eventually. Scientists don't give a fuck about consequences, just renown. Even if it's 100% likely that creating a super-intelligent synthetic being would mean the destruction of mankind, it will happen eventually if it's possible. Better known as the man who destroyed humans than to not be known at all, I guess.


----------



## Himistu (May 24, 2014)

Marlowe said:


> Very interesting. Why do you believe consciousness can't be grown in a lab?


The first problem is that you have to know what it is. If we look at the brain, where is the "end point" for all signals. Does a glob of electrons in some random location suddenly equate to consciousness? Hypothetically, if it did, we would could theoretically be making conscious natures everywhere and not know it, and there would be no way to determine if they were consciousnesses / conscious natures. After all, the only way we know of a consciousness is that we can communicate it to each other. With other things, there is no way of knowing, and even simulated intelligence or a replication of that cloud of electrons supposedly equating to consciousness does not confirm the consciousness.
Interjection: Notably, scientists don't care - if we have something that looks and acts like life, we've done our job. From a philosophical perspective, it only matters in declaring whether something has "life" in the sense of having a consciousness. So, yes, it is a pointless argument, but still interesting.

But frankly, I can't see how a cloud of electrons would make a consciousness. The electrons, for all we can observe scientifically, are inherently meaningless. The only way it results in a consciousness is by being in a human brain (or you could say animal brain, if they have conscious natures, but again, we don't know). This implies something else is reading them, which I call the "soul", whatever it may be.

The biggest issue with consciousness is that endpoint. We take meaningless info - signals, wavelengths, etc. - and turn it into sight, sound, and feeling, and even an awareness of time. How? There must be some endpoint, independent of the observable physical world in my opinion. Computers never change the info into something with inherent meaning. They turn it into electrons, which, as I said, have no inherent meaning.
I'm looking specifically, of course, for an endpoint to the information processing chain. Unfortunately, there are no words for it because it isn't something we can describe with anything else in reality... except itself. It is fortunate that we all have the same experience, although from my epistemological studies, I can say even that is in question.

"But I said grown in a lab" you might say. If you mean by starting with humans, I wasn't arguing against that point, but that's not really "creating life" - it's starting with life and merely helping it grow. With bacteria or some other anime, it's the same question: helping it grow in a lab is merely helping grow life rather than "creating life". But if you meant assembling nano-structures, etc. then while you can create the animal, you can't create the consciousness for the same reasons as I listed above with the electron clouds etc. Structure doesn't equate to conscious thought. Now, it may appear like I'm contradicting myself in that I say bacteria has "life", but I don't mean "conscious life", and even if it did, the bacteria alone, being the complete thing from the beginning, would be responsible for passing its consciousness along to the next child bacteria. Destroying the bacteria and reassembling it would not necessarily reassemble the consciousness or instill it back into the creature as far as we can tell (and we can't even tell whether it has a consciousness or not).

Again, it's all something that can't be measured, and the only way we can tell we have consciousness and have some idea of it is because we have one. It reminds me of Star Trek, movie 4, when Bones asks Spock what death was like, and Spock replies, "It would be impossible for me to describe without some common point of reference." to which Bones replies correctly, "You mean I would have to die first?"


----------

