Machines can be programmed and ‘grown’ to do useful things. They could one day have a kind of consciousness, an attention capacity of their own.
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Some scientists believe that free-range, pre-life organic molecules spontaneously joined together to make the first organisms. Joining and scission can be seen in the laboratory when scientists create self-assembling nanotubes known as `living polymers.’ Vestiges and fundamental qualities of our earliest ancestors remain encoded within us today. Whether plant or animal, fungus or virus, each living thing culminates out of a very long chain, bringing information from primordial times. Throughout evolutionary history, an astounding variety of life forms have been chanced upon. Given our narrow existential perspective, most of them would look alien and bizarre to us now. During the Cambrian explosion over 500 million years ago, many animals with very strange body plans and weird appendages (as strange and weird as ours might seem to them, were they here to observe) evolved. Each of the life kingdoms that we know today — the protists (single-celled eukaryotes), monera (prokaryotes), archaea, fungi, plants, and animals — began with a unique distant ancestor. A.G. Cairns Smith hypothesizes that clay crystals begat life. The crystalline latticework, as it grew and broke apart, provided scaffolding for new crystal growths. As these crystals incorporated more organic molecules into their structure, with reproductive advantage, the organic molecules eventually became sophisticated enough to co-opt their host’s matrix and float away, perhaps on the next tide, as autonomous life. (Also see ‘The Loss of Entropy’) Life may have arisen from naturally occuring mineral crystals that replicated by spontaneous mineralogical processes, eventually providing the framework for, and stimulating the production of organic molecules which form the basis for modern organisms. (Also see ‘Terrestrial Matrix’)
Ann Erpino Fine Art 