Attached Link: http://dsc.discovery.com/news/afp/20041213/blind.html

"Study: Blind Man Reads Emotion" Recognizing faces, emotions etc. is all hardwired deep in our brains and I would guess evolved pretty early in our history. It's one of those complexities of perception that we're just beginning to understand. I tend to agree that even hyper-realistic 3D rendering is missing some subtle unconscious clues that a skilled painter is able to capture. Some people claim to be able to see "auras" and I suppose there might be some kind of electro-magnetic or other type of field that living things generate that we can sense but how does that translate to an image. If a painting can have the elusive "spark of life," so to speak then I don't see it as some metaphysical manifestation in the arrangement of pigment molecules. The fact that 3D or animation lacks that indefinable "something" doesn't necessarily mean that the missing ingredient lies in the realm of the supernatural. I think it's more likely an incredibly complex interplay of muscle and tissue combined with the emotional state and preconceptions of the viewer, all filtered through the kind of low level firmware in our brains dedicated to processing that information. It's a terribly difficult problem but I don't think it's insoluble. I think it's at least conceivable that at some point we might create robots that display all the characteristics of human intelligence but whether they would be "alive" or have "souls" is a question for theology and philosophy, not science.

"Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance." - H. L. Mencken