X-Message-Number: 21689
Date: Mon, 28 Apr 2003 00:45:53 -0700
From: Mike Perry <>
Subject: Pregnant Bots

Robert Ettinger writes

>After Adam maybe comes Eve MacElectrosap. If they can be given human mental
>attributes, why not equivalent physical attributes? Can Eve become pregnant?
>If so, can she ever be just a little bit pregnant, or is it a yes-or-no
>proposition? If it is yes-or-no, then emergence is down the drain. If only
>organic systems can become pregnant, why is it not possible that only organic
>systems can feel?

I don't see why inorganic systems could not (in principle) become pregnant, 
as one possible means of self-replication, something we could engineer in 
the future, though we might not want to. As for pregnancy, though normally 
we see it as "all or none" there are borderline cases too such as 
teratomas. Discreteness is certainly present in things and seems to 
dominate at the level of the very small. But in many circumstances, with 
larger systems especially, you also have many intermediate states between 
extremes.

Mike Perry

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