Artificial life for philosophers
Philosophical Psychology 11 (2):251 – 260 (1998)
| Abstract | 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. | |||||||||
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Similar books and articlesAlexander 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.
Tom Froese & Shaun Gallagher (2010). Phenomenology and Artificial Life: Toward a Technological Supplementation of Phenomenological Methodology. Husserl Studies 26 (2):83-106.
John P. Sullins (2005). Ethics and Artificial Life: From Modeling to Moral Agents. Ethics and Information Technology 7 (3).
Brian L. Keeley (1994). Against the Global Replacement: On the Application of the Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence to Artificial Life. In C. G. Langton (ed.), Artificial Life Iii: Proceedings of the Workshop on Artificial Life. Reading, Mass: Addison-Wesley.
Margaret A. Boden (ed.) (1996). The Philosophy of Artificial Life. Oxford University Press.
Liz Stillwaggon Swan (2009). Synthesizing Insight: Artificial Life as Thought Experimentation in Biology. Biology and Philosophy 24 (5):687-701.
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