snarles comments on What is life? - Less Wrong

9 Post author: Douglas_Reay 01 April 2012 09:12PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (44)

You are viewing a single comment's thread.

Comment author: snarles 03 April 2012 01:03:00PM 1 point [-]

Our intuitive concept of 'life' conflates two concepts: the ability to reproduce and complexity. Many would consider a machine made by an advanced civilization (but incapable of reproduction) as 'alive'; meanwhile, one might hesitate to call prions 'alive', despite their capacity to replicate, merely due to their simplicity.