Author Bio: Aristotle is well known as a Greek philosopher of ancient times. He wrote on many subjects, ranging from poetry to biology.
Summary
- Hypothesis: Plants have at least part of a soul.
- Methods: The author observes the nature of various plants and compares them to animals and people.
- Results: The paper did not produce anything conclusive, per se, but it served as a thorough analysis on several plants.
- Contents: Through his observations, the author is able to describe in great detail the features and workings of a wide variety of vegetation in an attempt to show that plants exhibit signs of a soul.
Discussion
Despite the depth of detail presented in this work, I believe it fails to end conclusively. The writing is rather remarkable and very informative for Aristotle's time. However, I find that much of the information is now either common knowledge, debunked, or rectified. I also thought the writing to be quite repetitive, but it was probably much more interesting back then.
While reading the various comparisons made between each type of plant, I thought of how that paralleled not necessarily today's computers, but rather the programs housed within. Each program was literally made for a purpose. Some may be as mundane as a temporary data storage, while others (like Adobe Photoshop) are vastly complex and serve as multimedia creation and editing tools. The capabilities of these programs far exceed the abilities of, not only animals, but humans (which is why we create these programs in the first place). Thus, computer programs can be likened to living creatures. In fact, the idea of computers/programs having a soul has often been explored. In the popular video game series Halo, for example, the AI's have a personality of their own, leading one to assume they have a soul. I would very much want to witness the birth of such an AI, but I do not know if humanity will even come close to that technological advancement (at least within my lifetime).
No comments:
Post a Comment