Talk:Synthetic life

Photo

What does the photo has to do with the article? Amanitas and frogs aren't synthetic lifeforms. Why not rather choose some picture of the recent advances in this science? --187.54.102.48 (talk) 16:03, 7 February 2011 (UTC)

Definition of Synthetic Life

Is there a distinction between life that is entirely synthetic versus life that has come into existence by use of biological materials and synthetic means? It seems to me that the UK group has made the later. The cellular machinery and membrane belonged to a naturally occurring organism. Only its chromosome and thereby DNA is synthetic. While this DNA will change the cell into a new organism, making it the first synthetic species, I think it is misleading to call this synthetic life. It is my understanding that there is a project to develop the first fully synthetic cell by producing the proteins, lipid belayed, and organelles as well as genetic material from "scratch" by means of advanced organic chemistry. But I may have just been confused with the UK group's work. I make this distinction not out of an argument for the "natural vitality" theory but rather to demonstrate the practical differences. If we achieve truly synthetic life, we will have much more creative freedom and fewer functional limitations on engineering custom life forms than with synthetically created life that requires the parts of other organisms for their genesis. So maybe that distinction should be made in this article. Goodleh 00:05, 9 October 2007 (UTC)

To be honest, there's a potentially huge grey area between biological and synthetic life. If you make a cell out of material that's been generated by genetically modified bacteria, for instance, is it synthetic or biological? It's more of a philosophical question than anything else. Can anyone find any references that talk about this? That would be the best way to address this ambiguity. --Numsgil 01:33, 9 October 2007 (UTC)

Wet alife merge

Please discuss.

I do not see justification for a seperate article. The most pressing form of synthetic life is wet alife.

Nanobots, Self replicating machines and Artificial intelligence are distinct concepts. Wet alife appears to be synthetic life without any other context.--ZayZayEM (talk) 06:06, 5 December 2007 (UTC)

Wet alife is synthetic life that's otherwise identical in nature to biological life. That is, the stuff that wet alife makes is a subset of the stuff that could be considered alive, and created by artificial means. Synthetic life is the broader term for anything that could be considered alive, whether it's in silicon, in vitro, or some weird combination of the two. The two ideas are definately distinct. --Numsgil (talk) 00:47, 7 December 2007 (UTC)

Calling a simulator system "artificial life" does not vest it with life. Still I agree with the merge, and please find some references to go with it. BatteryIncluded (talk) 02:00, 13 April 2008 (UTC)

That's entirely what this page is (or should be) about. The definition of life as presently accepted entirely denies something like a computer program from being considered "alive". But there's certainly a motif in science fiction about life forms which are in silico (that is, computer based instead of biologically based). The article shouldn't (and doesn't, hoepfully) make any claims about what is and is not alive, or could be alive. Rather, it discusses (hopefully with some links in the future, I know it's rather Spartan) the different attitudes and ideas about this sort of thing in science and fiction. At the moment, it has a strong slant towards wet alife, because there are lots of links about current research you can find pretty easily, but the in silico stuff has to go somewhere, becuase it sure doesn't belong in the Artificial life article, which is where it was originally. Which is why this page exists at all. If we want to make the wet alife article a link to a section in this article, or move the wet alife content in to the actual wet alife article, I'd be fine with that. But the two concepts are different. You can't just merge the two pages. --Numsgil (talk) 08:12, 13 April 2008 (UTC)

The problem is that the term "artificial life" has been appropriated by computer geeks and applied to what should be called simulated life or virtual life. The normal sense of the word "life" refers to living, physical, biochemical entities, so "artificial life" would be human created living, physical, biochemical entities. So the term "synthetic life" has been used to refer to artificial life, and now the propellor heads want to claim that term too. 118.208.25.140 (talk) 21:10, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

You just ruled out your own existence. Life hasn't ever been defined as "biological" (rather, biology is defined in relation to life), it's merely a set of requirements that have to be met. 107.10.53.28 (talk) 17:51, 23 July 2011 (UTC)

"Bodiless" AI ain't so bodiless

This is my original thought on reading the article, so I'm not putting it in, but it seems so obvious that I have to point it out somewhere.

Generally speaking, AI researchers aren't looking to build an AI out of metaphysical constructs. They're looking to build it out of silicon and metal and plastic. They probably even plan to hook it up to some physical I/O devices, so that it can, y'know, interact in some way with the outside. In what way does this not constitute a body? --Ian Maxwell

It's supposed to mean a purely software construct. An AI that runs on Windows instead of inside a robot. It's not the greatest way of describing it, so if you can think of a better term, please do change the article. --Numsgil (talk) 20:17, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

What about the recent synthetic life created by Ventner in the US?

Surely the recent life created by Ventner and his US team should get a rather significant mention here - at least it seems to me that it would be an important addition...

UKBikerman (talk) 17:10, 31 July 2010 (UTC)

so what about the idea of a biological machine multi celled organism? if you built a cell and put a computer DNA in it, would it become conscious? —Preceding unsigned comment added by GarretCarey024 (talk • contribs) 20:01, 2 May 2011 (UTC)

Contradiction

"These efforts are largely independent from the computational simulation of artificial life which is related to the discipline of robotics." vs the article that led me to this article, Artificial life: "There are three main kinds of alife,[3] named for their approaches: soft,[4] from software; hard,[5] from hardware; and wet, from biochemistry." The bolded "wet" is a Wikilink leading to thise page. --126.109.230.149 (talk) 04:54, 26 October 2011 (UTC)