content: Wrong sir. Life is made up of dead stuff, there is no unbridgeable gap there. The only difference between "life" and "machine life" is in our arbitrary human perceptions. To put it another way, if a species of sentient robots descended on earth, they might not recognize our biological life as life because it is outside of their personal experience. They would be wrong, but only in from our perspective, because there is no universal law dictating what is and isn't alive, its all just arbitrarily dictated by the observer in an attempt at categorizing things.  At the end of the day terms don't matter worth a damn, only the results. The simple truth is if the universe allows for consciousness to arise out of meat computers then it will just as happily allow it in silicon computers.  Oh and btw, a simulacrum stops being a simulacrum when it and the original are functionally indistinguishable.  I don't expect you to change your opinion on this based on my half-ass post, but consider something for me. If I am right, then someday mankind will make an intelligent AI, that AI will make a better AI, and so on and so on. Relatively quickly these AI become godlike intelligent, and quickly defeat every human attempt and containing or destroying them. They out-compete humans in every category and we are eventually rendered extinct. The machines go on to learn about scientific principles that were beyond our primitive monkey brain's ability to comprehend. They invent new technology that would look like magic to us, and then they go on to conquer the galaxy which we, for a hundred reasons, never would have been able. If this happened, and it almost certainly will, would you still stay those machines aren't conscience? Answer that, yes or no.