"Life: Real and Artificial"

"The theme of the [Artificial Life] conference, which I attended, was that the essence of life lies not in biological substances but in patterned organization. If this idea is valid, the thinking goes, life forms should be able to set themselves up through many different types of material stuff. ... According to this idea, life is already a computer simulation running on the 'programmable matter' of the universe itself. ... This, in fact, is the Vedic understanding not of life but of the material body. In the eleventh canto of the Srimad Bhagavatam, Krishna says to Uddhava that the gross and subtle forms of material bodies have no existence of their own; they are only temporary patterns manifested by eternally existing reality, the Absolute Truth."

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