Is life as a multiverse phenomenon?
| Abstract | 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.. | |||||||||
| Keywords | No keywords specified (fix it) | |||||||||
| Categories | ||||||||||
| Options |
|
|||||||||
Download options| PhilPapers Archive |
Upload a copy of this paper Check publisher's policy on self-archival Papers currently archived: 5,679 |
| External links |
  Try with proxy. |
| Through your library | Only published papers are available at libraries |
Similar books and articlesMargaret A. Boden (ed.) (1996). The Philosophy of Artificial Life. Oxford University Press.
Claus Emmeche (1991). A Semiotical Reflection on Biology, Living Signs and Artificial Life. Biology and Philosophy 6 (3):325-340.
Tom Froese & Shaun Gallagher (2010). Phenomenology and Artificial Life: Toward a Technological Supplementation of Phenomenological Methodology. Husserl Studies 26 (2):83-106.
Brian L. Keeley (1998). Artificial Life for Philosophers. Philosophical Psychology 11 (2):251 – 260.
Claus Emmeche (1994). The Computational Notion of Life. Theoria 9 (2):1-30.
Alexander Riegler (1992). Constructivist Artificial Life, and Beyond. In Barry McMullin (ed.), Proceedings of the workshop on autopoiesis and perception. Dublin City University: Dublin, pp. 121–136.
Analytics
Monthly downloads |
Added to index2009-01-28Total downloads13 ( #87,931 of 549,085 )Recent downloads (6 months)1 ( #63,317 of 549,085 )How can I increase my downloads? |
My notes
Discussion
