The one thing in Luc Besson’s death rattle of a movie, Lucy, that made any sense was the idea of time providing a sense of life. Time is the measurement by which we define life—though we do it unconsciously. Think about: If we are made up of our energy, our actions, and our memories, we must have some constant by which those things exist. That is time. In particular, the passing of time allows for motion and even thought. No matter how instantaneous these things seem to be, they all occur within some quantum unit of time. Another way to look at death is as the cessation of future time. Once we are gone we can no longer perceive or inhabit time as it thrusts forward towards the eventual collapse of the universe.
Sometimes, I like to think that death is merely the end of our film and once over our consciousness continues to inhabit every moment of that film, allowing us to exist in those moments over and over again. In that sense we live in our own memories. This may be a happy or deeply unhappy existence, depending on the life one lead. Generally I feel we all experience both emotional poles throughout the course of our lives.
All of this brings me back to the question of life itself: Are we ‘alive’ and what does that mean exactly? Alan Turing developed a test decades ago that determined if something was a thinking person or an automated device. Modifications of the original Turing test are all across the ‘net as method of rooting out smart bots designed to pose as ‘people’ simulate the possible options a person would have to carry out instructions.
What separates us from those machines is a deeper level of scripting or social coding as well as a level of autonomy surrounding our code. While a computer is coded to carry out a specific set of instructions based on a quantifiable number of variables, most of us are coded to respond to more of a ‘prime directive’ on a social and biological level, and make autonomous decisions guided by that directive. Surprisingly enough this is best displayed through the interactions of teenagers in high school where the ‘prime directive’ is often as simple as gaining social recognition and status, with all of our autonomous actions carried out by the ridiculous amount of computing power in our brains working towards the directive. Not to make light of suicide, but it can be explained in the same way. The person committing suicide is often responding to a prime directive of personal happiness and is therefore reacting to a set of variables that have caused them to see the directive/goal as completely unattainable and as such to see life as untenable. What to us who still can reach our prime directive seems insane is merely a scruffy logic solution to a problem.
So, are we alive or just machines? Both, I think. We are programmed like machines from the moment of out births. We also come with a preexisting set of biological programs designed to keep us alive and reproducing. Regardless of who or what forces created us, we have since become learning machines capable of developing our own scripts and social programs for the world and changing the world to suit those scripts. There is little difference between this and where we are headed with artificial intelligence.
The one difference is that an AI knows it is a machine created by something (for the moment) greater than itself. Most humans believe we were created by something greater than ourselves, but how many are willing to admit that we are biological machines?