by sogekik » Tue Apr 23, 2019 4:10 am
6948. ancestry is responsible for species, but generally, the term ancestry refers to a recent not distant relation, your grandfather opposed to a small reptiloid millions of years ago, that separates you from a dinosaur for the first time, this, by the way, is when mammals and birds diverge genetically. in which case it becomes a question of abstraction in a distant abstraction of ancestry we have your human relatives going back a few hundred years, in a high abstraction your ancestry goes back to a single-celled organism that is related to everything. this for reference is very much the same difference typing words into this magic box in your web browser, and performing the same task in binary specific to your computer to send a message over a network in a dozen different protocols to get the message onto the forum. point being, if you're exceptionally pedantic that's true, but ignores both the point I was making and the difference between 2 different meanings for the same word.
6949. Ancestry in the case of the Archaic meaning of race refers pretty much to nationality and lineage, not to the scope of evolutionary divergence 100's of years ago, and like the other meanings of race is pretty much restricted to the same species.
6950. technically speaking they are capable of sex, even in a fairly human sense, chances are if you've ever used a USB stick or a cable and plugged it into your computer you've forced it to in effect have sex. you have inserted a male port into a female port, creating a transfer of data, this alone doesn't facilitate reproduction, which is where robotic reproduction becomes complicated, copying a file, could technically be seen a reproduction (hence my comment on Asexual reproduction), but this doesn't strictly constitute reproduction in the sense that biological life reproduces (A-sexually or otherwise), especially as generally the new program will essentially still be the first program, depending on the same sources, and in the case of a self-aware automaton ( an intelligent machine), these would end up being 2 nodes as part of the same network, and therefore essentially the same program that you started with, not a new entity.
6951. when I say they do not strictly have a lineage what I mean to say is programs do not really evolve, an AI can learn yes, and change its programming; it's through the process to reflect this, a Robot is effectively a physical body running a program, and therefore a vessel for the entity, not the entity in and of itself. To create a new program you change the programming, but this is basically equivalent to rewriting the brain.
6952. as sentience is a philosophical term there isn't an exact science to defining it, but generally speaking, what science considers to be sentience in varying degree's is self-awareness and higher reasoning; an understanding of complex interactions and they're consequences. sentience isn't black and white but ignoring wording my point is in fantasy games, books et al. elf is a race, human, orcs, dwarves are all races, deers, bears, rabbits are not, the difference predominantly being higher reasoning.