copy yourself ?

jan ziak ziakjan at host.sk
Thu May 22 23:51:46 UTC 2003


On Thu, 22 May 2003 14:43:41 -0700, Nevin Pratt wrote
> jan ziak wrote:
> 
> > hi. i would like to ask whether some squeaker has ever seen an object 
> > which is capable of copying itself. for example, i have a glass in 
> > front of me - certainly an object - but i have never seen any glass 
> > copying itself in front of me when i say "copy yourself" to it. in 
> > contrary, i have only seen people or machines capable of copying a glass.
> 
> Don't limit your imagination based on the current bounds of science. 
>  We currently have a myriad of tangible products that, at one time,
>  were completely inanimate, but because of increasingly embedded 
> processors, are no longer so.  Think books, fridges, appliances, 
> etc., for examples. So, what was science fiction yesterday is often 
> now everyday reality.
> 

it depends on how you define "replicate itself". i define it in a way which 
leads me to say that the above paragraph is false. there will not exist such 
books, fridges or what ever never. but my opinion is a matter of how i define 
the term "to replicate itself". no living creature is a closed system, on the 
contrary, it is an open system interacting with its environment.

i define "capable of self replication" like this: let's have an intelligent 
glass which knows how to make glasses with the same shape as is its shape. 
the intelligent glass has a "glass making" logic attached to it. i personally 
do not attribute the capabilities of that logic to the glass which it 
attached to it - they are distinct objects to me: the glass as such (without 
the logic) is incapable of self-replication, it's a stupid glass. your 
opinion, i think, is that when i attach the glass-making logic to this stupid 
glass, then you define the resulting composition as self-replicating.

i DO NOT define the resulting composition as self-replicating. for me it is 
just a glass incidentially attached to a machine which makes the same glasses 
as the one which it is attached to. thus, the glass itself, any glass, is 
incapable of self-replication by this definition.

> Hence, the fact that currently a common glass is incapable of 
> copying itself is completely irrelevent.
> 
> As to your suggestion that "wouldn't it be more rational to have 
> objects capable of constructing copies of objects?", that seems to 
> me to be an orthogonal question to whether or not the receiver can 
> or should be able to create a valid copy of itself.  Both concepts 
> could both be true simultaneously, both be false simultaneously, or 
> one true and the other false, independently.
>
 
i agree

> Nevin






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