Online research in philosophy

Artificial Life is an interdisciplinary effort to investigate the fundamental properties of living systems through the simulation and synthesis of life-like processes in artificial media. The field brings a powerful set of tools to the study of how high-level behavior can arise in systems governed by simple rules of interaction. This tenth volume marks two decades of research in this interdisciplinary scientific comunity, a period marked by vast advances in the life sciences. The field has contributed fundamentally to our understanding of life itself through computer models, and has led to novel solutions to complex real-world problems -- from disease prevention to stock market prediction -- across high technology and human society. The proceedings of the biennial A-life conference -- which has grown over the years from a small workshop in Santa Fe to a major international meeting -- reflect the increasing importance of the work to all areas of contemporary science.

artificial life, each of which is a grand challenge requiring a major advance on a fundamental issue for its solution. Each problem is briefly explained, and, where deemed helpful, some promising paths to its solution are indicated.

Recently, biologists and computer scientists who advocate the "strong thesis of artificial life" have argued that the distinction between life and nonlife is important and that certain computer software entities could be alive in the same sense as biological entities. These arguments have been challenged by Sober (1991). I address some of the questions about the rational reconstruction of biology that are suggested by these arguments: What is the relation between life and the "signs of life"? What work (if any) might the concept of "life" (over and above the "signs of life") perform in biology? What turns on scientific disputes over the utility of this concept? To defend my answers to these questions, I compare "life" to certain other concepts used in science, and I examine historical episodes in which an entity's vitality was invoked to explain certain phenomena. I try to understand how these explanations could be illuminating even though they are not accompanied by any reductive definition of "life.".

There are two likely paths for philosophers to follow in their encounters with Artificial Life: they can see it as a new way of doing philosophy, or simply as a new object worthy of philosophical attention using traditional methods. Is Artificial Life best seen as a new philosophical method or a new phenomenon? There is a case to be made for each alternative, but I urge philosophers to take the leap and consider the first to be the more important and promising.

Artificial life (ALife) is the attempt to create artificial instances of life in a variety of media, but primarily within the digital computer. As such, the field brings together computationally-minded biologists and biologically-minded computer scientists. I argue that this new field is filled with interesting philosophical issues. However, there is a dearth of philosophers actively conducting research in this area. I discuss two books on the new field: Margaret A. Boden's The philosophy of artificial life and Christopher G. Langton's Artificial life: an overview. They cover three areas of philosophical interest: the definition of life, the relationship between life and mind, and the possibility of creating life within a computational environment. This discussion allows me to critique past work in the philosophy of ALife that tends to see the field as a proving ground for traditional arguments from the philosophy of artificial intelligence. Instead, I suggest, what is interesting about ALife is how it differs from artificial intelligence and that the most interesting philosophical issues in the area are those derived from biology, not psychology. I recommend that these two books taken together constitute an interesting introduction to ALife and the wealth of philosophical issues found therein.

The field of artificial life is enriching both the content and method of philosophy. One example of the impact of artificial life on the content of philosophy is the light it sheds on the perennial philosophical question of the nature of emergent pheonomena in general. Another second example is the way it highlights and promises to explain the suppleness of mental processes. Artificial life's computational thought experiments also provide philosophy with a methodological innovation. The limitations of the central arguments in Stephen Jay Gould's..

Contemporary artificial life (also known as “ALife”) is an interdisciplinary study of life and life-like processes. Its two most important qualities are that it focuses on the essential rather than the contingent features of living systems and that it attempts to understand living systems by artificially synthesizing extremely simple forms of them. These two qualities are connected. By synthesizing simple systems that are very life-like and yet very unfamiliar, artificial life constructively explores the boundaries of what is possible for life. At the moment, artificial life uses three different kinds of synthetic methods. “Soft” artificial life creates computer simulations or other purely digital constructions that exhibit life-like behavior. “Hard” artificial life produces hardware implementations of life-like systems. “Wet” artifi- cial life involves the creation of life-like systems in a laboratory using biochemical materials.

This new volume in the acclaimed Oxford Readings in Philosophy sereis offers a selection of the most important philosophical work being done in the new and fast-growing interdisciplinary area of artificial life. Artificial life research seeks to synthesize the characteristics of life by artificial means, particularly employing computer technology. The essays here explore such fascinating themes as the nature of life, the relation between life and mind, and the limits of technology.

Artificial life (also known as “ALife”) is a broad, interdisciplinary endeavor that studies life and life-like processes through simulation and synthesis. The goals of this activity include modelling and even creating life and life-like systems, as well as developing practical applications using intuitions and methods taken from living systems. Artificial life both illuminates traditional philosophical questions and raises new philosophical questions. Since both artificial life and philosophy investigate the essential nature of certain fundamental aspects of reality like life and adaptation, artificial life offers philosophy a new perspective on these phenomena. This chapter provides an introduction to current research in artificial life and explains its philosophical implications.