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How did the "mother" creature come to be? By what mechanism did its complexity emerge?
There is no known or plausible mechanism by which complex life can arise without evolution, and technology which does not change its design is (very appropriately) by the definition above, not life.
It could be a human "mad scientist" creating hordes of Pikachus.
Suppose the scientist has also attained biological immortality for himself, and the Pikachus have spread to multiple planets over thousands of years.
You come upon such a colony planet, but you have no knowledge of their creator. They display no clues that hint at the scientist's role in their civilization (for a civilization it has become by now.)
You cannot discern how the Pikachus are coming into existence. Would you classify them as life? Why not?
How would your interactions with them and their interactions with the universe be fundamentally different than any other life you encounter?
What if they were robotic instead of flesh-and-fur?
Can they mutate? If so, then they satisfy all four boxes and they count as life.
If the Pikachus are made of cells, they'll certainly mutate/vary, since their heritable material is DNA, which is quite fragile.
Really, it's hard to imagine having "reproduction" without "mutation" in the imperfect physical world where errors are possible— I can't imagine any copying process, even a technological one, which succeeds with perfect fidelity and 100% probability. So if you have #1, #3 is basically going to be a given, because the universe is imperfect.
I don't think "what material they're made of" matters much, except that by definition flesh has to be alive, since it's made of things (cells) that tick all four boxes.
If the Pikachus don't reproduce themselves, and/or are created with perfect fidelity every time, then yes, I would call them technology and not life. We certainly wouldn't say that iPads (Pikachus) coming from a factory ("mother creature") are alive.
No, they're all created by the mad scientist but can think, reason, communicate, teach, interact, invent and construct perfectly fine on their own.
> I don't think "what material they're made of" matters much ... If the Pikachus don't reproduce themselves, and/or are created with perfect fidelity every time, then yes, I would call them technology and not life.
So, to distill your criteria for life, it comes down to:
• Species must consist of "individuals" who join in pairs to produce another individual.
• New individuals must be slightly different from the individuals who reproduced them.
In other comment [0] you say that you could consider software to be alive:
> Note that "alive" by the given definition doesn't imply "conscious" or "intelligent"
> We certainly wouldn't say that iPads (Pikachus) coming from a factory ("mother creature") are alive.
But if an iPad had a software process that connected to another iPad, and they both commanded the factory to create a new, slightly different iPad, would they be considered alive? :)
Where did you get pairs from? If the Pikachus reproduced by binary fission (splitting in half and then growing a new half, like cells do), or had 18 genders, they would still evolve. They only have to make copies. Doesn't matter how.
> No, they're all created by the mad scientist but can think, reason, communicate, teach, interact, invent
If they can't reproduce (and/or aren't made of stuff that can reproduce), I would say complexity of behavior is irrelevant.
For example, the identical iPads coming off the factory line are still technology, whether they are loaded with simple software or complex software. The complexity could go all the way up to AI, but they would still be technology.
Note that we are used to "intelligent" meaning "alive", because the only intelligent thing we know of at this point in history (us) is alive. But I think it is perfectly valid to suppose that non-living things could be intelligent or even conscious.
> So if an iPad [...] created a new, slightly different iPad, would they be considered alive?
Yes, under those conditions they would certainly start evolving, and I think that's a perfectly reasonable line to draw between technology and life. In this new example, the "phenotype" of the iPads would change in a self-sustaining way, emergently, independent of any design or intent.
