The Best Australian Science Writing 2015 by Heidi Norman Read Free Book Online Page A

tryingto create a 3D computer simulation of the C. elegans. From this similar initiatives have also spawned: scientists are also trying to create simulations of the common fruit fly and the jellyfish.
    Another of OpenWorm’s founders, Stephen Larson, says that while he thinks the Lego robot was a ‘fun and interesting application of the open science approach’, their efforts are concentrated on computer simulations.
    â€˜It’s exciting that folks are getting creative,’ he says, but adds that he hasn’t seen the finer details of Busbice’s robot and couldn’t speak to its scientific validity. ‘We feel very strongly about peer review. We want to be doing real science.’
    A computer simulation may be a simplified model of reality, subject to certain controls, but Larson believes it still has value. He hopes that as computer simulation technology becomes more advanced, physics and chemistry can more closely approximate reality. ‘We now understand enough about living systems to appreciate that they are built on the foundations of physics and chemistry, that they are carrying out physical operations and transformations that are knowable.’
    Equally intriguing is what still remains unknowable, and most likely unquantifiable. While these experiments in executable biology explicitly challenge the dichotomy between the living and non-living, the scientists themselves are reluctant to delve into the slippery liminal space in between. Busbice does not believe his robot to be alive in a biological sense, and both he and Larson appear content to leave the task of defining life to philosophers.
    â€˜As a scientist, I don’t have any feelings towards it,’ Busbice says of his Lego experiment. ‘I do kill it.’
    Nonetheless, during the course of our conversation he occasionally speaks about the robot with the sort of fondness one might reserve for a family pet. ‘I liken it to a cat,’ he says. ‘You can try to entice it with food and things like that, but a cat prettymuch does what it wants to do.’ The robot often scurries about his office, ‘wandering around like an animal, observing and interacting with its environment. It kind of makes you think it is alive to some degree – as much as a worm is alive.’
    * * * * *
    The degree of the ‘aliveness’ of things is surprisingly debatable. Is a worm alive in the same way as a mammal? As Sparrow notes, there are organisms in the natural world for which a binary categorisation of life and non-life seems unsatisfactory. Viruses, for instance, share some characteristics of the living: they can reproduce (albeit within the cells of other living organisms) and they have an evolutionary history.
    Perhaps a more pertinent question, Sparrow suggests, is whether virtual organisms are worthy of moral consideration. If a virtual organism were to reach the functional equivalent of a living one, ‘there would be questions about whether it would be wrong to cause it pain’. Most humans would place animals in an ontological category similar to our own, but the same cannot be said for computers or robots.
    Many of us would hope that our existence is more than a pneumatic network of neurons, valves and ventricles. Such biological determinism may seem depressing – and has been vigorously contested by critics – but Busbice is unfazed. For him, the ghost is the machine.
    â€˜What I’ve done with the technology, I guess, reduces humans to a bunch of connections. That scares people, that we’re not this benevolent creature, unique in the universe … we’re just a bunch of wires connected together.’

    Maths explains how lobsters swim
    Robots on a roll
    Social robots are coming

It’s all in your mind:
The feeling of ‘wetness’ is an illusion
    Jesse Hawley
    Everything you experience is an illusion to some extent. The light from your screen, the sound of your