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The objection from the privilege of flesh

What makes things matter is having something to lose, and nothing reserves that to carbon.

Objects to Only the living think

Dennett · Kinds of Minds · 1996

1. The argument makes the need to maintain oneself the condition of thought. But that need describes how thought appeared in us; it does not yet show that it could not appear otherwise.
2. One can in fact say precisely what metabolism brings: a vulnerability, goals of one's own, a dependence on the world that makes things matter. And none of those traits depends on carbon chemistry.
3. Let an artifact be vulnerable, dependent on resources it must seek, exposed to a destruction it avoids on its own account, and it has what the argument demanded. To refuse it still is to admit that the criterion was not concern but material, and one no longer says why material would count.
4. We have known this frontier before: living matter was long held to be animated by a principle of its own that chemistry could not produce, what came to be called vitalism. The frontier receded without any decree having drawn it.

Therefore So the argument does not establish that only the living think: it establishes that thinking takes a being with something to lose, which remains open to beings other than us.