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[Megaton_Hope]

It still ain't life. When you turn on a machine, it isn't being born, and when you turn it off, it isn't dying. Life is something which animals have and machines do not have, because of the way they are constructed. (Leaving metaphysical business like souls or spirits to the side, because they are unimportant.) And sentience, consciousness, sapience or whatever you prefer to call it has no relationship to life, except when speaking of sentient organic beings, which are both alive and sentient.

Sentient machines, on the other hand, are not and cannot be alive, unless they have been designed to imitate such cumbersome organic processes as eating, pooping, and viviparous or oviparous reproduction.

Which you could do, I suppose, if you can make husks and things like that. WHY you would do it, that's a whole other question. If you were an immortal being which needed neither to eat, sleep, nor make dookies, then I say don't fix what ain't broke.

[Nightwriter]

Yes but I think Mass Effect, like much sci-fi, is prompting you to ask such profound questions as "is life more than the ability to poop?"

[Megaton_Hope]

Nightwriter wrote...

Yes but I think Mass Effect, like much sci-fi, is prompting you to ask such profound questions as "is life more than the ability to poop?"

I wouldn't call pooping an ability, really. Duty, maybe. Solemn obligation. The dookie imperative.

In any case, "life" is a pretty limited business that, all things considered, we'd be better off without, if in the process we became functionally immortal, gained the ability to commune directly mind-to-mind, and could don or doff physical bodies at will. Of course, life and self-awareness are two very different things that are treated synonymously in human fiction because humans are pretty self-centered, and like to forget that house cats and bacteria are alive.