Is it possible to recreate perfectly what Nature does?
Trivially yes, but why would you want to? Nature's designs are awful.
Is the creation of artificial life (literally life made by art—or human skill) even possible?
Trivially yes. There are even papers on it now.
In a recent post, I wrote the following:
Perhaps it is just my brain seeing patterns where they don't exist, but this sentence really describes for me a truth about the world that helps me better understand our time and place. Take, for example, the questions of A.I. and the Longevity movement.
Finding Parallels
Ever since man emerged from his cave and first laid eyes on the lands beneath the sun he has willed to know the future and to be master of his own destiny.[1] This has been true in every age and every place. Mythology is chock full of tales of actual historical rulers and mythic heroes searching for the glory and wealth of this world and, once they've "got it all", they turn to the one thing they can never truly have: eternal life. Rulers funded sages and alchemists who promised to make them immortal. They were already rich, now they needed time.
Of course their time did eventually come, just not how they intended.
Today we see the modern Longevity movement echoing its ancient past and it's no surprise that it has resurged among the super wealthy most visibly. In my reading of the subject (which is admittedly light), every time there is a sizable concentration of wealth among an elite class in peace time, the members of that class tend to become enamored with ideas of eternal youth/life.
The Epic of Gilgamesh continues to be relevant and assigned reading, even in the modern day.
Photo credit: Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin FRCP(Glasg) - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0
On the subject of A.I., consciousness, and the Singularity[2], there's important context in the historical record. Many medieval alchemists were obsessed with the creation of artificial life, some even going so far as to believe that they'd live to see the first attempts succeed (if it hadn't already somewhere in secret), an eerily-familiar discourse.
This, of course, isn't to say that we're not close to a foundational change in humanity's understanding of life and intelligence, however that is a distance that can only be measured in retrospect. The point I'm making is that these conversations have been going on for decades, centuries even, and we would do well to see ourselves not as singular figures in the current moment, but as characters in a larger tale. Today we ask questions about consciousness and the morality of keeping (eventually) sentient beings at our beck and call. The alchemists debated this too and their perspectives may be illuminating to us (even if only because the modern person would likely disagree).
In his book, Promethean Ambitions, Dr. William Newman investigates the myriad perspectives of the ancient and medieval scholars who took on these thorny questions. In particular to us here are the twin questions:
Most scholars denied that such a thing was possible, but many alchemists were sure it was and such a belief was deeply bound up with the alchemical quest to make gold (chrysopoeia). To this, the philosopher and scholar Ibn Sina famously wrote:
Ibn Sina argued that art (i.e. human skill) could only imitate nature in the creation of gold because art was always based on something the artist perceives not on what actually is. To Sina there was something about gold that was beyond the reach of mankind to create. This however turned out to be wrong, but it took a few centuries to find out.
Yet this argument was repeated to refute the alchemical goal of creating artificial life. Alchemists long searched for the method of creating humans and various sub-human forms of life, including the homunculus (literally: tiny human) a sort of proto-human life form. The homunculus was supposed to be wise, knowing how to speak from birth, and possess great knowledge that the alchemist could exploit and later kill before it grew and attained full personhood. Scholars debated seriously the ethics of this dilemma. Was the creature, if it existed, a human being with a soul? If so, it was unethical to exploit, imprison, and kill it.
Sound familiar?
Of course, the medieval scholars held values quite different and frankly foreign to our own today, but that doesn't mean their discourse has no parallels nor that it's entirely different from our own.
Medieval Musings
Scholars of the Middle Ages understood life to exist on a three part scale where plants, animals, and humans each occupied different rungs on the ladder and so could be exploited by the beings above them on the ladder. To the medieval scholars, life was imbued with a tripartite soul. Thus plants, with their "vegetative soul" could grow and reproduce but not move about or think. Motion or animation was the property granted by the "animal soul", and rationality was due to the "rational soul". Only humans were imbued with the latter part and so were "a rung above" the other life within creation. Thus a homunculus, lacking a rational soul, was lacking in what it means to be human. This opinion comes to us via the medieval alchemist (known as pseudo-Thomas) by way of Newman when he writes:
Now, obviously there is much to disagree with at the very foundation of all this, but that isn't the point. The point is that this historical context can be useful in our conversations today because, just like pseudo-Thomas and his contemporaries debated: if artificial life truly is different, there must be a reason why that difference exists. Pseudo-Thomas had a reason. Do we? And if we cannot find a reason, then we are on the side of the alchemists against whom pseudo-Thomas was writing who argued that mankind can do just as Nature can and create life through art alone.[3]
Reframing the Present
We've been grappling with these questions and seeking the same possibilities for as long as we've stared up at the stars and wondered at our place in this universe.
Today we've achieved what the alchemists dreamed of. We can make gold. However Nature, with her cruel sense of humor, made it prohibitively expensive to do so on any real scale. The alchemists had the same problem: the cost of the charcoal and starting materials alone made even the eventual success of making gold quite unprofitable.
And now we seem to be on a collision course with the second question of the alchemists and indeed many ancient and medieval philosophers: can we create artificial life and if so, what does that entail.
If we should fail at this, even if we make useful tools along the way, then we've but followed in the footsteps of the alchemists in their inspiring unsuccess. However, if we succeed then we might want to revisit their thoughts on this subject, leverage our collective memory, not because it is right, but because opening a broader dialogue with our collective humanity could very well illuminate answers to the oldest questions we have.
Yet another paraphrased quote I stole from an episode of the Ezra Klein show.
A term which by now seems to be both prophetic and defined down enough to be both mystical and achievable in a finite number of quarterly updates somehow simultaneously.
Here I use art as Newman and the alchemists did. Art is the foundation of the word artificial and artifact. Literally it means: the work of humans. These days we use the word differently, but it retains the meaning in many words. To medievals carpentry, chemistry, tanning, painting, music, and cooking were all different kinds of art. Not because they were beautiful, but because they were unnatural.