You inadvertently brought up the issue that people who work with Artificial Life bump into all the time. And for the same reason. At what point is something tr

You inadvertently brought up the issue that people who work with Artificial Life bump into all the time. And for the same reason. At what point is something truly alive is just as difficult to answer as at what point something is truly intelligent. Remember back in the 90's when there were people trying to argue that computer viruses were actual life forms! The irony is that we don't actually consider real world viruses to be alive, so this was really out-of-this-world thinking. Self-awareness is clearly somewhere in between the two. Valetino Braitenberg famously wrote a mind experiment about "Vehicles" which eventually, through interactions with their motors and sensors, become self-aware. There are a lot of questions like "How is this different than experiencing happiness?" He called it Synthetic Psychology, which imo is quite a wild way to frame these things. So falling for this mirage is definitely not a new thing.