Online research in philosophy

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.

In several disciplines within science—evolutionary biology, molecular biology, astrobiology, synthetic biology, artificial life—and outside science—primarily ethics—efforts to define life have recently multiplied. However, no consensus has emerged. In this article, I argue that this is no accident. I propose a dilemma showing that the project of defining life is either impossible or pointless. The notion of life at stake in this project is either the folk concept of life or a scientific concept. In the former case, empirical evidence shows that life cannot be defined. In the latter case, I argue that, although defining life may be possible, it is pointless . I conclude that scientists, philosophers, and ethicists should discard the project of defining life.

In this note some epistemological problems in general theories about living systems are considered; in particular, the question of hidden connections between different areas of experience, such as folk biology and scientific biology, and hidden connections between central concepts of theoretical biology, such as function, semiosis, closure and life.

In this note some epistemological problems in general theories about living systems are considered; in particular, the question of hidden connections between different areas of experience, such as folk biology and scientific biology, and hidden connections between central concepts of theoretical biology, such as function, semiosis, closure and life.

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.

When posing the question "is artificial life possible?", our immediate answer is that on the one hand : of course it is - people make it, and indeed very interesting and even breathtaking structures have already been constructed, such as `aminats', self-reproducing patterns and the other things, we have seen already. In this sense we are forced to take artificial life as a fact (at least as a fact about a new branch of research), nearly in the same way that the philosopher Kant took the theoretical physics of his days, Newtonian physics, as a matter of fact, and then asked: What are the conditions of possibility for this kind of theoretical science? On the other hand: The situation differs from Kant's. Artificial Life does not confront us with an analogy of theoretical mechanics within the field of biology. We face a curious situation: It is not obvious to the majority of biologists that Artificial Life is possible at all, at least in the purely computational sense of `software life'. Probably, most biologists would never call these artificial constructs `living'. Why not? Because the intuitive notions of life and living systems within biology implies, among other things, that living beings are a result of a long, ongoing evolutionary process that have created autonomous organisms, single-celled and multi-celled, that are highly organized, open (non-equilibrium), material thermodynamic systems based on metabolism and some kind of genetic information supported by macromolecules, that only metaphorically resemble a computer program. It is not that..

Is life a property of the material structure of a living system or an abstract form of organization that can be realized in other media; artificial as well as natural? One version of the Artificial Life research programme presumes, that one can separate the logical form of an organism from its material basis of construction, and that its capacity to live and reproduce is a property of the form, not the matter (Langton 1989). This seems to oppose the notion of a cell within contemporary molecular biology, according to which "form" and "matter" do not represent separate realms. The information in a living cell is intimately bound to the properties of the material substrate. This condition may represent a restriction on the validity of formal theories of life.

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.".

First, a principal distinction between two different kinds of semiotic investigations is introduced, both required in the study of living signs and signs of life. Then, the attempt within the new field of Artificial Life to model and synthesise computationally based living systems is discussed with special attention paid to the possible emergence of genuine life-like behaviour in such models of for instance self-reproduction. Remarks will be made on a seemingly odd aspect of the biological concept of life; that it is not as coherent as normally conceived of. In general, biosemiotic emergence of new sign functions is distinguished from other kinds of emergence that pertain to the domain of the observer and the modeling relation.

The present paper discusses a topic often neglected by contemporary philosophy of biology: The relation between metaphorical notions of living organisms as information processing systems, the attempts to model such systems by computational means (e.g., Artificial Life research), and the idea that life itself is a computational phenomenon. This question has ramifications in theoretical biology and thedefinition of Iife, in theoretical computer science and the concept of computation, and in semiotics (the study of signs in the most general sense, including information, signification, and meaning), and the concept of the interpreter. It is argued, that the theory of autopoietic systems known from theoretical biology should be integrated with a biosemiotic reflection on the natural history of signs.