Can we "produce" a human body without it being alive?

Sorry, I meant “cloning”.

My understanding is that you need a live recipient receiving a nucleus from a live donor in regards to cloning; however, once AI is perfected, this may all fly out the window!!!

Your question is one huge contradiction. A human body cannot be developed without it being alive either as a parasite (like an embryo) or as a guest (like a full term baby).

Cellular division does not happen in an unliving entity.

And this has nothing to do with the theological question of souls.

A “soul” is a human imaginary construct.

I believe that the body is attracted to the soul. I think in order to be human that the body must be alive

There is no such thing as a soul.

That seems obvious

We can certainly create body segments, usable and transplantable.
What is a soul? It is normally described in ways which describe personality and cognition. Love, despair, self awareness, self preservation, are all involved with brain activity.
I see no way at this time that a brain can be produced, let alone functional.

I watched THE most fascinating 60 Minutes last night. A guy is using gene therapy to make humans resistant to ALL viruses. I’m debating whether or not that’s a good thing.

there is too much rigamarole in the wording of this question. The question can be reduced to simply “can we ‘produce’ a soul?” The question itself requires the very dubious assumption that a soul is required for proof of life.

@stanleybmanly: I pointed that out merely because there’s a high percentage of people believing to have experienced an NDE (near-death experience), even clinically dead, even reporting what a nurse, doctor, etc. said while that person was that clinically dead.

Part of the question is “Can we “produce” a human body without it being alive?” And the answer to that is very clearly NO. Cloning may produce an embryo, but that’s just a way of creating a living clone human baby. It’s not manufacturing a body. There is no technology for that.

The part about whether you can put life into a dead body, is Doctor Frankenstein’s question. And that’s a science fiction cautionary tale about the hubris and folly of excessive materialism.

I would say though that even if you could somehow construct a body cell by cell (which, no, you can’t) it would tend to be quite dead because even if you could do it in a second, living bodies aren’t just cells and fluids but also processes with very sensitive chemical (and non-human organisms) and temperature and motion and electrical impulses and neuron programming in process. At best you’d get a body in shock with no memories at all. But really, no, it’s not going to work even without considering souls.

That question breaks down not only because there is no actual example, but also because your language about human souls doesn’t define what you mean, and I don’t think there is one “what everyone says”, and the people you’re asking here have various ideas, a popular one seeming to be that they reject your word “soul” (probably because of the religious context) – you might do slightly better with “consciousness”.

To attempt to answer your core question anyway, people do not know for sure, but from the perspectives I know of that do take souls, spirits, consciousness, or whatever seriously, many such perspectives take the view that our consciousness/spirit is something that usually has its attention on our body, but is not our body. So if a functioning body magically appeared from nowhere… we don’t know, but a soul/spirit/consciousness might attach to it (and then experience what’s in its nervous system – if it had no history or memories, probably pretty messed up), or maybe not… I tend to think that either way, you’d likely have a body in a coma.

I watched a very interesting article on 60 Minutes yesterday that says we’re on the verge of being able to grow virtually any organ with the persons own cells, which that can convert to stem cells.
Do each of those body parts have a soul?

^^^^ @Dutchess_III See you previous answer. right after the three modded answers.

I’m just asking the same questions I would have asked when I was a practicing Christian. I think we’re narrowing the soul down to the brain.

This question directly addresses something I include in one of my fiction works. I am excited to see more discussion of what all members have to say.

As an animist, I feel there’s spirit in non-living objects too. What sort of spirit might be in an engineered body part, I’m not sure. Probably a limited and confused one.

If there was something akin to something called a “soul,” I would say it was another name for the ego. “The self, ... the consciousness of the individual’s distinction from other selves.”*

*from Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary. 1960 ed.

@kritiper The meanings I have for “ego” and “consciousness” has them as extremely different things from each other. The ego is one’s idea of oneself in one’s habitual thought patterns. The consciousness is the perspective with which you actually experience and observe things, and from which it is possible to observe the ego and distinguish the ego from your consciousness. The consciousness is what sometimes wakes up and has to remember what year it is, where you are and who the body it’s in is and what it’s life has been up till this point.

@Zaku My specific meaning was my own, not that of some dictionary, although I got the wording from one.
The ego is a human construct, like the “soul.” It doesn’t occupy any real space, which is also true of “consciousness.”

There are two questions here. The first is a technological one. Could we design a machine whose behavior was indistinguishable from a conscious being? The machine could not just sense things like light, sound and temperature. It would be programmed to talk about its mental images and speak of things that make it comfortable or uncomfortable, happy or sad.

The second question is whether or not this machine really has consciousness. My answer to this second question is that from a practical point of view, it would be best to treat it as if it had consciousness. Whether or not it really does is irrelevant.

@LostInParadise: I asked if you could create a organic machine without the machine acquiring self-consciousness (like, never). As I suspect that, being organic, the AI will, I told about a human body.

How do you determine if your organic machine has consciousness? Give an example of something that you are absolutely certain that it could never do and how you could test for it.