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tales of the Golem, and here too we must be careful of unregulated capabilities.
Intelligence being the closest thing to ensoulment, in the realm of A-life and computer science, the obvious goal - but how will we do that, and how will we know when we have? As Turing famously observed, we won't. (13) The only way to tell whether something is alive, then, is through observation; life as a fundamental characteristic is terribly ill-defined. Those present-day thinkers who argue and pontificate in editorials about such quasi-theological matters as clones' ensoulment or lack thereof are falling into a pattern of thinking which will, unfortunately, probably prove unhelpful due to its necessary lack of universality; as we see, the only universal, and therefore the only useful, approach is a legal and sociological definition of life. In this period of scientific history, we are closer than ever before to the exogenetic creation of something empirically indistinguishable in its mental properties from a living human. The way in which we approach this question, then, will prove vital to the entire future development of the treatment of intelligent beings.

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