State: The missing link?

A quick note on thoughts I have had recently regarding the difference between a living creature and a computer program. Namely, what are those differences?

If an artificial life, let's call it a program, terminates, is it correct to say that it is dead? When the program starts up, is it being born? In some sense, yes. But something has been missing. It has kept me from being convinced that a program could ever be considered life. I think that missing link is state.

When you go to bed at night, your conscious thought process stops, but your state, all of the acquired experiences and memories that make you unique, is saved. Upon waking, your state is restored so that what makes you "you" remains, and you go on as a single continuous flow of execution, or, consciousness.

Without state, we would be like a program that starts and stops. Too frequent and too simple to be thought of as a living being. I think that state is a large missing component that is required if we ever want to reach a point where we're comfortable thinking that a computer program is a living being. It is easy to terminate a program without thinking that we should consult our morality, but it would be different to terminate a long running program that has acquired many years of experience and all the complexity that has lead to its current state.

We may think a little harder about the consequences, about what may be lost.

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