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Oxford Readings in Philosophy
The Philosophy of Artificial Life
The aim of this series is to bring together important recent writings in major areas of philosophical inquiry, selected from a variety of sources, mostly periodicals, which may not be conveniently available to the university student or the general reader. The editor of each volume contributes an introductory essay on the items chosen and on the questions with which they deal. A selective bibliography is appended as a guide to further reading. This volume offers a selection of the most important philosophical work in the new and fast-growing interdisciplinary area of artifical life; it will set the agenda for future study and research. Artifical life (A-Life) research aims to synthesize the characteristics of life by artifical means, particularly employing computer technology. The essays chosen explore such fascinating themes as the nature of life, the relation between life and mind, and the limits of technology. The first two papers, one of which is the classic A-Life manifesto by Christopher Langton, provide a general overview of the subject and compare it with artificial intelligence (AI); in Part II, the contributors describe examples of A-Life research. Part III discusses various explanatory strategies in A-Life, and relates them to approaches in AI and cognitive science, while Part IV focuses on the concept of life in general. Finally, Part V explores A-Life's relation to functionalism and the feasibility of `strong' A-Life.
- GenresPhilosophy
414 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1996
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
July 2, 2024
I, robot. The philosophy behind artificial life
_In the last ten years, the ancient dream of creating life yourself has been revived. Artificial Life proponents claim to have actually created life from the very beginning. In the meantime, many concepts used by A-Life appear to be extremely problematic. That's why the English philosopher Margaret Boden called a dozen people together to think about it again. This resulted in a book of considerable philosophical quality._
Chris Langton of the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico, the man who coined the term Artificial Life (A-Life) ten years ago, states bluntly that where ordinary biology studies life by taking it apart, A-Life does that does by putting it together. However, real life requires a lot of things, such as being capable of open evolution, flexible adaptation to a changing environment, and a certain autonomy in relation to the environment. Something like metabolism doesn't seem unimportant either. While higher forms of life also require consciousness, intelligence and conceptual thinking. What these aspects entail and how essential they are for a definition of life is the subject of discussion in _The philosophy of artificial life_.
As an example of evolutionary A-Life, Thomas Ray discusses the now well-known computer simulation Tierra. At Tierra, self-reproducing and parasitic computer programs compete with each other for a computer's memory space. Because the programs have a limited lifespan and are subject to random changes (mutations), an evolutionary process arises. But it remains to be seen whether this is a truly open evolution, in which new senses arise through evolutionary interaction with the environment, for example. Insofar as new senses arise in evolutionary simulations, the possibility of this has already been baked in by the designer of the simulation, while for Howard Pattee of New York State University it concerns new developments that have not been calculated in advance. Only then can there be real life.
Another much-discussed example of A-Life is Craig Reynolds' 'boids'. This simulates a flight of whimbrels (boids) flying around a number of obstacles. The flight of each individual boid is only determined by three simple local rules, the most important of which is 'keep the distance to other boids and obstacles at a certain minimum'. The boids fly in a beautiful and natural-looking flock around a number of columns. They demonstrate an important methodological principle of A-Life, namely the bottom-up approach. The design of A-Life systems, whether robots or computer programs, is not based on regulation of high-level processes, but on a limited number of local rules at low level. The overall behavior of the system is a consequence of the interaction of the rules at the low level. One speaks of emergent behavior to indicate that something new arises at a higher level that was not there at a lower level. This emergence is generally considered to be an essential characteristic of living beings, whereby an entire organism ultimately functions based on local biochemical processes at cell level.
An example of a typical A-Life robot is an 'insect' with six legs that can climb over obstacles. Walking behavior is determined by a few simple instructions for each of the individual legs, such as 'lift the leg and move it forward when you bump into something'. The A-Life insect is therefore an example of a second important principle, working as little as possible with representations of the outside world, which must first be recognized and on the basis of which actions are then planned and taken. The insect reacts immediately to the outside world, without first thinking about what it bumps into. A-Life prefers to work with direct, local responses to the environment.
People also speak of autonomous robots, because their actions are not controlled by a rigorous human-designed computer program. Margaret Boden notes that this is a different kind of autonomy than _acting with a certain independence from the immediate environment_, which we usually understand. According to Boden, true autonomy would have both aspects: adequate response to the immediate environment and higher order control mechanisms to achieve independence. These control mechanisms would have to be generated by the organism itself in a process of self-organization in which interaction with the environment plays a crucial role.
The question to what extent representation is a requirement to be able to imitate higher functions such as conceptual thinking and intelligence with A-Life is discussed in a number of contributions. Michael Wheeler from Oxford takes the position in _From robots to Rothko_ that representation is not necessary and cites philosophers such as Heidegger. _En passant_ he attacks the, according to him, too Cartesian subject/object separation that classical artificial intelligence and cognitive sciences introduce. By including the representation of all kinds of objects in the world models that they give their robots, they commit themselves to a metaphysics in which those objects exist separately from the organism. However, according to Wheeler, the world for an organism only comes into being through interaction with its environment. What that world looks like depends on the situation and the physical activity that an organism develops within it.
Finally, the key question: can A-Life ever become real life? Two contributions rarely see this happening, for two reasons.
- Firstly, because A-Life does not involve metabolism, physical processing of environmental elements into energy and building blocks for the A-Life organism.
- Secondly, because a lot has to happen for evolution to be truly open. In the A-Life simulations of evolution, an organism will not simply develop a new sense, such as an eye or ear, unless it has been built in beforehand. To make these kinds of new developments possible, embodiment seems essential, so that the organism and its genes can truly interact with its environment.
The question then of course is what embodiment and metabolism exactly do and do not entail. So philosophers always have something to do.
(translated from the Dutch with Google Translate)
_In the last ten years, the ancient dream of creating life yourself has been revived. Artificial Life proponents claim to have actually created life from the very beginning. In the meantime, many concepts used by A-Life appear to be extremely problematic. That's why the English philosopher Margaret Boden called a dozen people together to think about it again. This resulted in a book of considerable philosophical quality._
Chris Langton of the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico, the man who coined the term Artificial Life (A-Life) ten years ago, states bluntly that where ordinary biology studies life by taking it apart, A-Life does that does by putting it together. However, real life requires a lot of things, such as being capable of open evolution, flexible adaptation to a changing environment, and a certain autonomy in relation to the environment. Something like metabolism doesn't seem unimportant either. While higher forms of life also require consciousness, intelligence and conceptual thinking. What these aspects entail and how essential they are for a definition of life is the subject of discussion in _The philosophy of artificial life_.
As an example of evolutionary A-Life, Thomas Ray discusses the now well-known computer simulation Tierra. At Tierra, self-reproducing and parasitic computer programs compete with each other for a computer's memory space. Because the programs have a limited lifespan and are subject to random changes (mutations), an evolutionary process arises. But it remains to be seen whether this is a truly open evolution, in which new senses arise through evolutionary interaction with the environment, for example. Insofar as new senses arise in evolutionary simulations, the possibility of this has already been baked in by the designer of the simulation, while for Howard Pattee of New York State University it concerns new developments that have not been calculated in advance. Only then can there be real life.
Another much-discussed example of A-Life is Craig Reynolds' 'boids'. This simulates a flight of whimbrels (boids) flying around a number of obstacles. The flight of each individual boid is only determined by three simple local rules, the most important of which is 'keep the distance to other boids and obstacles at a certain minimum'. The boids fly in a beautiful and natural-looking flock around a number of columns. They demonstrate an important methodological principle of A-Life, namely the bottom-up approach. The design of A-Life systems, whether robots or computer programs, is not based on regulation of high-level processes, but on a limited number of local rules at low level. The overall behavior of the system is a consequence of the interaction of the rules at the low level. One speaks of emergent behavior to indicate that something new arises at a higher level that was not there at a lower level. This emergence is generally considered to be an essential characteristic of living beings, whereby an entire organism ultimately functions based on local biochemical processes at cell level.
An example of a typical A-Life robot is an 'insect' with six legs that can climb over obstacles. Walking behavior is determined by a few simple instructions for each of the individual legs, such as 'lift the leg and move it forward when you bump into something'. The A-Life insect is therefore an example of a second important principle, working as little as possible with representations of the outside world, which must first be recognized and on the basis of which actions are then planned and taken. The insect reacts immediately to the outside world, without first thinking about what it bumps into. A-Life prefers to work with direct, local responses to the environment.
People also speak of autonomous robots, because their actions are not controlled by a rigorous human-designed computer program. Margaret Boden notes that this is a different kind of autonomy than _acting with a certain independence from the immediate environment_, which we usually understand. According to Boden, true autonomy would have both aspects: adequate response to the immediate environment and higher order control mechanisms to achieve independence. These control mechanisms would have to be generated by the organism itself in a process of self-organization in which interaction with the environment plays a crucial role.
The question to what extent representation is a requirement to be able to imitate higher functions such as conceptual thinking and intelligence with A-Life is discussed in a number of contributions. Michael Wheeler from Oxford takes the position in _From robots to Rothko_ that representation is not necessary and cites philosophers such as Heidegger. _En passant_ he attacks the, according to him, too Cartesian subject/object separation that classical artificial intelligence and cognitive sciences introduce. By including the representation of all kinds of objects in the world models that they give their robots, they commit themselves to a metaphysics in which those objects exist separately from the organism. However, according to Wheeler, the world for an organism only comes into being through interaction with its environment. What that world looks like depends on the situation and the physical activity that an organism develops within it.
Finally, the key question: can A-Life ever become real life? Two contributions rarely see this happening, for two reasons.
- Firstly, because A-Life does not involve metabolism, physical processing of environmental elements into energy and building blocks for the A-Life organism.
- Secondly, because a lot has to happen for evolution to be truly open. In the A-Life simulations of evolution, an organism will not simply develop a new sense, such as an eye or ear, unless it has been built in beforehand. To make these kinds of new developments possible, embodiment seems essential, so that the organism and its genes can truly interact with its environment.
The question then of course is what embodiment and metabolism exactly do and do not entail. So philosophers always have something to do.
(translated from the Dutch with Google Translate)
August 4, 2011
Whoa, these essays were tough to read. If I didn't have an expert in the field work me through them, I probably wouldn't have understood most of what was said.
With that out of the way ... this is a must-have for anyone serious enough to look into the topic of Artificial Life (not to be confused with Artificial Intelligence), as this is one of the only collections on the topic that I know of. This collection goes over the major ideologies in the field -- from GOFAI to NFAI, Hard- to Strong-ALife, and it has a veritable "Who's Who" of names: Langton, Brooks, Pattee ...
For a great supplement, and to see where the field of ALife is likely to head, I recommend reading Stephen Petersen's essay "The Ethics of Robot Servitude." Last I checked, you can get to it right from Google, and it's really a great read!
With that out of the way ... this is a must-have for anyone serious enough to look into the topic of Artificial Life (not to be confused with Artificial Intelligence), as this is one of the only collections on the topic that I know of. This collection goes over the major ideologies in the field -- from GOFAI to NFAI, Hard- to Strong-ALife, and it has a veritable "Who's Who" of names: Langton, Brooks, Pattee ...
For a great supplement, and to see where the field of ALife is likely to head, I recommend reading Stephen Petersen's essay "The Ethics of Robot Servitude." Last I checked, you can get to it right from Google, and it's really a great read!
October 7, 2016
This is a hard and unforgiving text to read. It is for other scientists and philosophers in the field. If you do not have someone walking you through it, this book is challenging. Luckily for me, I had just that for this course.
I have always found artificial intelligence fascinating, and now I have questions of artificial life bouncing around my head as well. Because this is such a new topic of professional discourse, I'm not sure where else to look for more like-minded reading. However, my professor on this subject wrote a great article called "The Ethics of Robot Servitude" (His name is Steve Petersen.)
I have always found artificial intelligence fascinating, and now I have questions of artificial life bouncing around my head as well. Because this is such a new topic of professional discourse, I'm not sure where else to look for more like-minded reading. However, my professor on this subject wrote a great article called "The Ethics of Robot Servitude" (His name is Steve Petersen.)
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews