Artificial Life
as Experimental
Philosophy

ALife has since its inception had a markedly philosophical character — a fact not unnoticed by some philosophers. Dennett, for instance, saw in ALife the creation of testable thought experiments kept honest by computational demands. Despite clear affinity, however, we have not yet witnessed anything like the engagement that Dennett foresaw.

This is not for ALife's lack of interest in or relevance to traditionally philosophical content, but perhaps rather for its practicing an alternate philosophy in which the reflexive relationship between pragmatic and theoretical is constitutive. In this respect, ALife may be closer to the original tradition of natural philosophy than philosophy in its more modern disciplinary forms.

"We will talk only about machines with very simple internal structures, too simple in fact to be interesting from the point of view of mechanical or electrical engineering. Interest arises, rather, when we look at these machines or vehicles as if they were animals in a natural environment. We will be tempted, then, to use psychological language in describing their behavior. And yet we know very well that there is nothing in these vehicles that we have not put in ourselves. This will be an interesting educational game."

This session invites broad reflection on the nature of this relationship between philosophy and artificial life. What role do computational experiments play in theory, and particularly in ALife as a modern form of natural philosophy? How does ALife address questions that philosophy also claims — including the nature of agency, autonomy, emergence, individuality — and how does its treatment differ? The conference theme itself poses one such question: what is life, and what does it mean to be life-like?

We welcome two complementary kinds of contribution: experimental work whose philosophical motivations or implications are brought to the fore, and philosophical or theoretical work that engages directly with ALife methods and results.

We are especially interested in contributions reflecting on the relationship between the two: on artificial life as a form of natural philosophy, and on philosophy as it is or could be.