"alive", life has deferent meaning (and defined requirements e.g self-reproduction) than "consciousness", "sentience" or "mind". Unless you belief in a mystica

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