All life is imbued with a “divine spark,” some intangible essence that keeps chemical reactions continuing in anti-entropic modality. Being alive, being an animal, is at the base of who we are. Senses, emotions, all the functions (heartbeat, breathing, eating, digesting, circulation, excreting,etc) go on in each one of us, often unnoticed. Hormones slosh through us, causing emotions and flavoring actions and thoughts.
Yet, when we consider intelligence, most people consider only the brain. And in fact consider it only as thought, language, applied logic, dry reasoning.
That is a huge mistake. Some fanatics think a person can be poured into a machine. After all, computers use language almost as well as we do. Just a few more pieces of hardware and we can achieve the singularity or a multiverse more real than reality, a dream in mechanical construct.
No. When you or I exit being an animal, even with all our language intact, we are no longer alive, no longer real, no longer our self. The dead can be made to appear alive, but they remain dead. That “singularity” is the modern equivalent of the medieval Philosopher’s Stone which was never found and can never exist.
HuntingtonHarborThoughts 