Life (what is it?)
[October 12, 2001 8:24 AM ]

This doesn't seem to have been so much of a problem before AL came along. Aristotle tried to understand what it is to be a living thing through "life-functions" or psyche – things like growth, reproduction, decay, perception, self-motion, thinking. While philosophers used to give it some thought, biologists seem strangely mute.

Emmeche has a whole chapter in his book on this, Farmer and Belin gave their take on it in the ALife II proceedings.

My view is that we have two different concepts of life – the life that we immediately recognize through our experience with the world – the folk psychological life which has something to do with our acknowledgement of agency in other things; and then there's the scientific life – folk psychological life plus all of the living things that we're not directly aware of (bacteria, viruses, etc.).

Recommended Reading:

Emmeche, C.: The Garden in the Machine. Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press (1994)

Farmer, D. and A. Belin: Artificial Life: The Coming Evolution, In Artificial Life II. C.G. Langton, et al., (eds.). Addison-Wesley: Redwood City, CA. (1992) 815-840.

Bedau, M.A.: The Nature of Life, In The Philosophy of Artificial Life. M.A. Boden, (ed.). Oxford University Press: Oxford. (1996).

[created: October 11, 2001 5:00 PM, last modified: October 12, 2001 8:24 AM]