Newsgroups: comp.ai.alife
Path: cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!das-news2.harvard.edu!news2.near.net!satisfied.elf.com!news.mathworks.com!uhog.mit.edu!bloom-beacon.mit.edu!news.media.mit.edu!minsky
From: minsky@media.mit.edu (Marvin Minsky)
Subject: Re: STOP blahblah on LIFE #1
Message-ID: <1995Feb13.180643.20672@news.media.mit.edu>
Sender: news@news.media.mit.edu (USENET News System)
Cc: minsky
Organization: MIT Media Laboratory
References: <1995Feb13.093832.13831@news.unige.ch>
Date: Mon, 13 Feb 1995 18:06:43 GMT
Lines: 23

In article <1995Feb13.093832.13831@news.unige.ch> sylvere@divsun.unige.ch writes:

>I propose (but, it's up to you to propose something else) everyone to
put his name, his first name and then his definition in one single
following mail.

"Life" is a word.  Sometimes it means the opposite of death.  Many
people (but not enough, by far) dislike death, so they'd like to
understand its opposite, which might best be described as 'not-death'.
However, that doesn't give them enough to chew on, so they proceed to
propose silly lists of attributes; then usually they recognize that no
single one of those attribute is essential, so then they add non-operational
hedges, ending without having said anything useful.

Before the time of Pasteur and Darwin, it appeared that certain forms
of matter were imbued with a vital spirit that animated them in
special ways that no other kind of matter could display.  Today we
know lots of engineering methods for reproducing those various
attributes, and there remains no reason to believe that there's
anything common to all of them.

To see the problem, try instead, to define the expression "good idea".

