I read through Bedau's paper again, and he has some objections to strong Alife listed, but doesn't really give any of them a fair chance. Basically, the objections boil down to object and representation. Say you look at a cat. The cat is alive, but is your mental image of it alive as well? Presumably not. Now, say you implement a Tierra simulation with paper and pencil. Which part of it is alive? Not the symbols on the page -- this is just representation, but something else which is hard to think about.
If a company isn't charging the best price to maximize revenue based on demand, they are fools. If the labels can raise what they charge Apple per song, thereby forcing Apple to raise prices to the consumer to maintain Apple's margin, I still think they can. Trust me, some songs, say the Top 10, can be priced at $1.50 a song and drive more revenue for Apple and the labels than if they are priced at $1.
Apple isn't interested in making money with the iTMS. They're interested in promoting the iTMS as an iPod feature. It's meant to attract and encourage the sale of iPods, not songs. If the price of a song goes up, the number of songs sold in a period will decrease. This is the last thing Apple wants.
You might call Apple foolish for not raising prices and making more form the iTMS, but then you'd be an idiot.
My question is, why is it so hard / bad to vary prices on iTunes?
Because it's just an excuse to raise prices across the board. Every label is going to want their songs at the highest price point. Apple realizes that the iTMS drives iPod sales, and they don't want to alienate their potential customer base by raising prices.
This implies that a collection of, say, dogs is alive. After all, a collection of dogs is made up of dogs, each of which is made up of cells. So a collection of dogs is just a collection of cells, and thus is itself a living organism.
You could argue for that. A lot of people believe (and have a fairly sound basis for) the claim that the Earth itself is a living organism. But most people don't realize that this is a consequence of the characterization you propose.
Mules can reproduce, or at least try very hard. There are three known cases of mules successfully breeding. The difficulty comes from the chromosome pair difference between donkeys and horses. Mules have all the parts and plenty of will.
This has been discussed. Male mules are sterile, even though mollies aren't necessarily. Still, a male mule serves as a counter-example to your characterization. In fact, relative to your characterization, a vasectomy would kill you. This is just absurd.
Keep in mind, I see what you mean. I just realize the difficulty of actually writing a characterization down. We all have an intuitive sense of what lives, and in most cases reproduction and metabolism are sufficient to correctly identify life. But life, as a general rule, is full of exceptions.
Look up "organism." It's going to have the word "life" in the definition. So any definition that depends on the word is circular. You are assuming that a star isn't alive to prove that it isn't alive.
Fair enough. The guy who wrote the virtual machine claims that Tierra synthesizes lift instead of just modelling it. I would tend to agree, even though it doesn't fit normal linguistic uses of the word "life." This position is referred to as "Strong Alife," as opposed to "Weak Alife."
Here's a nice paper. I studied under Mark Bedau, so I might be biased. In any event, if that counter-example didn't convince you, I'll try to think up an objection to strong alife or find a new counter-example.
I'll admit, this was tricky. It's very subtle, and I spent a while focusing on finding a living counter-example instead of a non-living one. Anyway, as far as I can tell, there are two distinct kinds of self-preservation. The first centers around an entity reacting to its environment to avoid bodily harm. The second centers around an entity reacting to its environment to protect its genotype. For instance, a bird might sacrifice itself to protect its eggs.
Programs running in the Tierra environment serve as a counter-example. From Wikipedia:
The computer programs in Tierra are evolvable and can mutate, self-replicate and recombine. Tierra is a frequently cited example of an artificial life model; in the metaphor of the Tierra, the evolvable computer programs can be considered as digital organisms which compete for energy (CPU time) and resources (main memory).
Given enough time (and free energy), humanity can design and build robotics to extract our minerals, manufacture our goods, and grow our food for us. Once that point is reached, R&D becomes a hobby for those interested instead of a department. Time will still be scarce since people have finite lifespans, but it won't be a commodity to be traded.
I guess you have a point, but in some senses, a mule is just a colony of cells. As we have established, the colony as a whole does not reproduce. Individual cells do. If we alter the sentence a bit... "An organism is an entitiy in which reproduction takes place." That would cover everything from a bacteria to a mule.
Indeed, but it also covers my house. This gets really slippery.
Regarding the evolution of sexual reproduction -- I'm sure there's been research done, but I don't have any references on hand. Perhaps a biologist can interject?
Uh it seems like you're just restating your gp post combined with the parent post and passing it off as a...correction? Or is the redundancy an effort to drive the point home?
The GGP was trying to the definition of "reproduce" (as in, an animal reproduces) around so that the mere fact that a mule's cells reproduce implies that the mule reproduces as well in an attempt to break my counter example. I just tried to point out that he is washing over a relevant and obvious distinction. With respect to the characterization of a living being as a reproducing metabolizing entity, if the distinction is made, a mule is not living even though its cells are.
Thank you for the correction regarding mules. My (admittedly out of date) resources say that both sexes are sterile. I'll make sure to specify that I'm referring to males in the future.:-)
Indeed, crystalline structures would be alive with respect to that characterization. Even amending reproduction to that characterization wouldn't suffice to make it work since some crystals are known to spontaneously break when they reach a certain configuration and whose fragmented peices build duplicate structures. (God I wish I had a reference for this)
Slashdot Mirror
If they aren't caught, they will eventually end up in permanent resources and possibly even print.
Mammary slits, huh? That sounds hot.
Yup. Is LimeWire publicly traded? This might be one to short.
Yes. I would buy a keyboard like that. What, you don't touch type?
But he implied that South Park was made using two-dimensional models.
No. South Park uses 3d models in Maya and uses cel shading to make it look two dimensional.
I read through Bedau's paper again, and he has some objections to strong Alife listed, but doesn't really give any of them a fair chance. Basically, the objections boil down to object and representation. Say you look at a cat. The cat is alive, but is your mental image of it alive as well? Presumably not. Now, say you implement a Tierra simulation with paper and pencil. Which part of it is alive? Not the symbols on the page -- this is just representation, but something else which is hard to think about.
Apple isn't interested in making money with the iTMS. They're interested in promoting the iTMS as an iPod feature. It's meant to attract and encourage the sale of iPods, not songs. If the price of a song goes up, the number of songs sold in a period will decrease. This is the last thing Apple wants.
You might call Apple foolish for not raising prices and making more form the iTMS, but then you'd be an idiot.
I got it backwards. Toward is "more common" in the US, but both are acceptable in both places. http://www.bartleby.com/64/C003/040.html
It's the latter. Forward, backward, afterward.
I take the bus, you insensitive clod. A car is a luxury.
Because it's just an excuse to raise prices across the board. Every label is going to want their songs at the highest price point. Apple realizes that the iTMS drives iPod sales, and they don't want to alienate their potential customer base by raising prices.
You could argue for that. A lot of people believe (and have a fairly sound basis for) the claim that the Earth itself is a living organism. But most people don't realize that this is a consequence of the characterization you propose.
This has been discussed. Male mules are sterile, even though mollies aren't necessarily. Still, a male mule serves as a counter-example to your characterization. In fact, relative to your characterization, a vasectomy would kill you. This is just absurd.
Keep in mind, I see what you mean. I just realize the difficulty of actually writing a characterization down. We all have an intuitive sense of what lives, and in most cases reproduction and metabolism are sufficient to correctly identify life. But life, as a general rule, is full of exceptions.
Look up "organism." It's going to have the word "life" in the definition. So any definition that depends on the word is circular. You are assuming that a star isn't alive to prove that it isn't alive.
Here's a nice paper. I studied under Mark Bedau, so I might be biased. In any event, if that counter-example didn't convince you, I'll try to think up an objection to strong alife or find a new counter-example.
Programs running in the Tierra environment serve as a counter-example. From Wikipedia:
Given enough time (and free energy), humanity can design and build robotics to extract our minerals, manufacture our goods, and grow our food for us. Once that point is reached, R&D becomes a hobby for those interested instead of a department. Time will still be scarce since people have finite lifespans, but it won't be a commodity to be traded.
Indeed, but it also covers my house. This gets really slippery.
Regarding the evolution of sexual reproduction -- I'm sure there's been research done, but I don't have any references on hand. Perhaps a biologist can interject?
Wow. Insert the word "twist" at that spot where my post makes no sense.
The GGP was trying to the definition of "reproduce" (as in, an animal reproduces) around so that the mere fact that a mule's cells reproduce implies that the mule reproduces as well in an attempt to break my counter example. I just tried to point out that he is washing over a relevant and obvious distinction. With respect to the characterization of a living being as a reproducing metabolizing entity, if the distinction is made, a mule is not living even though its cells are.
Thank you for the correction regarding mules. My (admittedly out of date) resources say that both sexes are sterile. I'll make sure to specify that I'm referring to males in the future. :-)
That's the sort of lifestyle I want.
In all seriousness, your observation implies that a mule's cells are alive (true) while a mule isn't (false). Mules don't reproduce. Their cells do.
Indeed, crystalline structures would be alive with respect to that characterization. Even amending reproduction to that characterization wouldn't suffice to make it work since some crystals are known to spontaneously break when they reach a certain configuration and whose fragmented peices build duplicate structures. (God I wish I had a reference for this)
Prions are yet more basic than viruses, for which it is debatable if they are alive. No one thinks LSD is alive, so why would you think proteins are?
That's a nice characterization. But it fails it. Mules are alive but cannot reproduce.