&quot;alive&quot;, life has deferent meaning (and defined requirements e.g self-reproduction) than &quot;consciousness&quot;, &quot;sentience&quot; or &quot;mind&quot;.<p>Unless you belief in a mystical soul component (I do not), there is nothing else &quot;there&quot; but machine. A very complex, biological machine. But there is no reason to believe that that a sufficiently powerful software&#x2F;hardware can not replicate the functionality of that machine exactly. Then what possible difference could there be between the two duplicate machines?<p>But, we will have systems that exhibit a many aspects of &quot;thought&quot; and sentience long before we are able to code up homo sapien sapien.