Philosophy of Artificial Life Bibliography


PURPOSE: To gather together citations and minimal annotations of all work concerning philosophical issues in the pursuit of Artificial Life. This is to include work of "professional" philosophers, scientific work with important discussions of foundational issues, as well as seminal & landmark work in the field itself.

AKNOWLEDGEMENTS: This bibliography was put together with the help of many people on the Net. See end of file for key to comments.

Adami, Chris, "On Modelling Life." In Artificial Life IV , Rodney A. Brooks and Pattie Maes, eds. MIT Press (A Bradford Book), 1994: 269-276. {A formal and experimental analysis of self-replication. -bk}

Aristotle, de Anima

Ascott, Roy, "Le Retour a la Nature II, l'art et la technologie au XXI siecle", in Louise Poissant, ed., Esthetique des Arts Mediatiques , Presses de l'Universite du Quebec, Quebec, 1995 , Tome 2.

Ascott, Roy, "Zurueck zur (kuenstlichen) Natur", in G. Kaiser, D. Matejovski, J. Fedrowitz, eds., Kultur und Technik im 21.Jahrhundert , Campus Verlag, Frankfurt, 1993.

Ascott, Roy, "Nature II: telematic culture and artificial life", in Julia Knight and Alexis Weedon, eds., Convergence , John Libby, London, 1995, Vol.1.

Ascott, Roy, "The Death of Artifice and the Birth of Artificial Life: a connectivist approach", in MarcPartouche, ed., Art Cognition , Cypres, Aix-en-Provence, 1993. {Four papers relating ALife to art/culture. -au}

Bec, Louis, "Elements d'Epistemologie Fabulatoire."  Artificial Life II , edited by C. Langton, C. Taylor, J.D. Farmer, & S. Rasmussen. SFI Studies in the Sciences of Complexity, Proc. Vol. X. Redwood City, CA: Addison-Wesley, 1991. {An artist on ALife. In French. -bk}

Bedau, Mark A., "Philosophical Aspects of Artificial Life." In Francisco J. Varela and Paul Bourgine, eds. Toward a Practice of Autonomous Systems: Proceedings of the First European Conference on Artificial Life . MIT Press (A Bradford Book), 1992: 494-503. {An overview of 14 philosophical aspects of ALife. -bk}

Bedau, Mark A., "Three Illustrations of Artificial Life's Working Hypothesis." In Biocomputation-- Evolution as a Computational Process , W. Banzhaf and F. Eeckman, eds., Springer-Verlag, 1995. {A reflection on ALife's "working hypothesis" that "simple computer models can capture the essential nature of [biological processes]." -bk Proposes that the field of artificial life operates under the working hypothesis that simple computer models can capture the essential nature of living systems, and illustrates this hypothesis with work concerning punctuated equilibria, adaptation at the "edge of chaos", and a law of adaptive evolutionary activity.}

Bedau, Mark A., "Weak Emergence", forthcoming in J. Tomberlin (ed.) Philosophical Perspectives, Metaphysics (Vols. 10-11), Ridgeview Press. {Defines, illustrates, and defends a concept of emergence that is ubiquitous in artificial life and the other "sciences of complexity". -au}

Bedau, Mark A., "The Nature of Life", forthcoming in M. Boden (ed.), The Philosophy of Artificial Life . {Proposes a view of life centered on "supple adaptability" and explicates this concept in the context of artificial life models. -au}

Bedau, Mark A., "Emergent Models of Supple Dynamics in Life and Mind", submitted to Brain and Cognition (special volume of papers from a Workshop on "A Bridge from Artificial Life to Artificial Intelligence", edited by A. Moreno). {Developes the analogy between the dynamics of living and intelligent systems, and draws out some implications for how to understand the mind. -au}

Bedau, Mark A., Evolution, Life, and Mind: A Lesson Emerging From Artificial Life {monograph in progress, to be published by MIT Press/Bradford Books, hopefully in 1996. -au}

Bedau, Mark A. and Packard, Norman H., "Measurement of Evolutionary Activity, Teleology, and Life." In Artificial Life II , Chris Langton, C. Taylor, J.D. Farmer, & S. Rasmussen, eds. SFI Studies in the Sciences of Complexity, Proc. Vol. X. Redwood City, CA: Addison-Wesley, 1991. {Half philosophy, half simulation work. An example of experimental philosophy. -bk}

Beer, Randall D., Intelligence as Adaptive Behavior: An experiment in computational neuroethology , San Diego: Academic Press, 1990. {A unified statement and application of the computational neuroethology approach to robotics and cognitive science. -bk}

Beer, R.D. (1995). "A dynamical systems perspective on agent-environment interaction". Artificial Intelligence 72:173-215. {An argument for the usefullness of dynamical systems in cognitive science, particularly in what they reveal about the adaptive coupling of agents and environments. -bk}

Bersini, Hugues, "Animat's I." In Francisco J. Varela and Paul Bourgine, eds. Toward a Practice of Autonomous Systems: Proceedings of the First European Conference on Artificial Life . MIT Press (A Bradford Book), 1992: 456-465.

Boden, Margaret, The Philosophy of Artificial Life . Forthcoming from Oxford University Press. {Containing a goodly portion of the best papers listed here, plus a selection of new papers, this should be the "standard text" for some time to come. -bk}

Bonabeau, Eric W. and Theraulaz, Guy, "Why do we need artificial life?" Artificial Life 1 (1994): 303-325.

Braitenberg, Valentino, Vehicles . {Seminal work on how to construct robots in an evolutionary plausible series of steps. -bk}

Cariani, Peter, "Emergence and Artificial Life,"  Artificial Life II , edited by C. Langton, C. Taylor, J.D. Farmer, & S. Rasmussen. SFI Studies in the Sciences of Complexity, Proc. Vol. X. Redwood City, CA: Addison-Wesley, 1991:775-797.

Cariani, Peter, "Some Epistemological Implications of Devices which Construct Their Own Sensors and Effectors." In Francisco J. Varela and Paul Bourgine, eds. Toward a Practice of Autonomous Systems: Proceedings of the First European Conference on Artificial Life . MIT Press (A Bradford Book), 1992: 484-493.

Clark, Andy, "Being There: Why Implementation Matters to Cognitive Science,"  Artificial Intelligence Review , (1987), Vol. 1, pp. 23?-244. {What the title says. -bk}

Clark, Andy, "Autonomous Agents and Real-Time Success: Some foundational issues." Paper presented at the 1994 American Philosophical Association Pacific Meeting, Los Angeles. {A philosophical look at the claims of situated roboticists like Brooks, Beer, and anti-Representationalists like Tim van Gelder. Suggests that the conclusions we should draw are not those which the roboticists claim (primarily, Clark argues that "representation" needs to be reconceived, not eliminated.) -bk}

Davidge, Robert, "Looking at Life." In Francisco J. Varela and Paul Bourgine, eds. Toward a Practice of Autonomous Systems: Proceedings of the First European Conference on Artificial Life . MIT Press (A Bradford Book), 1992: 448-455.

Dennett, Daniel C., "Why not the whole iguana?" Behavioral & Brian Science . {A short commentary which suggests modeling whole simple creatures instead of bits of more complex creatures. Nice companion to (Clark 1987). -bk}

Dennett, Daniel C., "Evolution, Error, and Intentionality,"  Intentional Stance , Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987: 287-321. {Considers the intrinsic intentionality of a machine that was built to protect our bodies indefinitely, and by analogy the intrinsic intentionality of the bodies which DNA have designed to preserve them, as in Dawkins' 'selfish genes'. -bk}

Dennett, Daniel C., "Artificial Life - Langton,C.G.." Biology & Philosophy , 1990 OCT, V5 N4:489-492. (Pub type: Book Review.) {A short, positive review of the first ALife volume. -bk}

Dennett, Daniel C. 1991 paper on "Reverse engineering".

Dennett, Daniel C., "Artificial Life as Philosophy." Artificial Life 1 (1994): 291-292. {*Very* short, almost contentless piece on the philosophical impact of ALife. -bk}

Dormay, Jean-Luc and Kornman, Sylvie, "Meta-Knowledge, Autonomy, and (Artificial) Evolotion: Some Lessons Learnt So Far." In Francisco J. Varela and Paul Bourgine, eds. Toward a Practice of Autonomous Systems: Proceedings of the First European Conference on Artificial Life . MIT Press (A Bradford Book), 1992: 392-398.

Eigen, Manfred, "The Self Organization of Matter"

Emmeche, Claus, "A Semiotical Reflection on Biology, Living Signs, and Artificial Life." Biology and Philosophy , 6:325-340. {The semiotics of ALife. -bk}

Emmeche, Claus, "Life as an Abstract Phenomenon: Is Artificial Life Possible?" In Francisco J. Varela and Paul Bourgine, eds. Toward a Practice of Autonomous Systems: Proceedings of the First European Conference on Artificial Life . MIT Press (A Bradford Book), 1992: 466-474.

Emmeche, Claus, "Is Life as a Multiverse Phenomenon?" In Artificial Life III , C. G. Langton (ed), SFI Studies in the Sciences of Complexity, Proc. Vol. XVII. Redwood City, CA: Addison-Wesley, 1994:553-568.

Emmeche, Claus, The Garden in the Machine: The Emerging Science of Artificial Life (Princeton U Press, 1994; translated by Steven Sampson from Emmeche's 1991 Danish Det Levende Spil: Biologisk Form og Kunstigt Liv ).

Farmer, D. F., and Belin, A. d'A. "Artificial Life: the coming evolution." In Artificial Life , edited by C. G. Langton. SFI Studies in the Sciences of Complexity, Proc. Vol. VI. Redwood City, CA: Addison-Wesley, 1989: 815-840.

Gardner, R. Allen and Gardner, Beatrix T., "Feedforward: The Ethological Basis of Animal Learning." In Francisco J. Varela and Paul Bourgine, eds. Toward a Practice of Autonomous Systems: Proceedings of the First European Conference on Artificial Life . MIT Press (A Bradford Book), 1992: 399-410.

Godfrey-Smith, Peter, "Spencer and Dewey on Life and Mind." In Artificial Life IV , Rodney A. Brooks and Pattie Maes, eds. MIT Press (A Bradford Book), 1994: 80-89. {What Herbert Spencer and John Dewey would have said about ALife. -bk}

Harnad, S. "Artificial Life: synthetic vs. virtual." In Artificial Life III , C. G. Langton (ed), SFI Studies in the Sciences of Complexity, Proc. Vol. XVII. Redwood City, CA: Addison-Wesley, 1994: 539-552. {Argues that ALife needs to worry about Searlean "Chinese Rooms" and other problems from artificial intelligence. Keeley 1994/1995 is, in part, a response to this. -bk)

Harnad, S. "Levels of functional equivalence in reverse bioengineering." Artificial Life 1 (1994): 293-301. {Primarily a regurgitation of the arguments of (Harnad 1994a), but a bit more clear in places. -bk}

Helmreich, Stefan, "The Historical and Epistemological Ground of von Neumann's Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata and Theory of Games." In Francisco J. Varela and Paul Bourgine, eds. Toward a Practice of Autonomous Systems: Proceedings of the First European Conference on Artificial Life . MIT Press (A Bradford Book), 1992: 385-391.

Hendriks-Jansen, Horst, "In Praise of Interactive Emergence, or Why Explanations Don't Have to Wait for Implementations." In Artificial Life IV , Rodney A. Brooks and Pattie Maes, eds. MIT Press (A Bradford Book), 1994: 70-79. {Title says it all. -bk}

Hendriks-Jansen, Horst [1993] 'Natural Kinds, Autonomous Robots, and History of Use'. Proceedings of the 1993 European Conference on Artificial Life , 440-450.(Marries Maja Mataric's landmark-detecting and navigating robot with Ruth Millikan's 'History of Use' to claim that interactively emergent patterns of situated activity constitute the most promising natural kinds for psychological explanations. -au)

Hendriks-Jansen, Horst [1994] 'Brain-Models, Mind-Models, and Models of Situated Behaviour'. AISB Quarterly , Spring 1994, 87, 29-35. (Argues that computational models cannot perform the explanatory role that analogical models have traditionally performed in scientific explanation and proposes an alternative use of computational techniques to evolve models of human behaviour. -au)

Hendriks-Jansen, Horst [forthcoming, in May 1996] Catching Ourselves in the Act: Situated Activity, Interactive Emergence, Evolution, and Human Thought . Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press (a Bradford Book). (A critique of traditional AI and connectionism as explanatory strategies. Argues that computational explanations cannot be grounded through natural selection. Draws on situated robotics, ethology and developmental psychology to construct a new framework for 'genetic' or 'historical' explanations of intentional behaviour anchored in species-typical activity patterns that have been selected by a cultural environment of artifacts, language, and intentional scaffolding by adults. -au)

Keeley, Brian. L. "Against the global replacement: on the application of the philosophy of artificial intelligence to artificial life." In Artificial Life III , C. G. Langton (ed), SFI Studies in the Sciences of Complexity, Proc. Vol. XVII. Redwood City, CA: Addison-Wesley, 1994: 569-587. {The original version appears in ALifeIII, but an improved version is available from the author. -au}

Laing, Richard, [Series of papers cited in Helmreich 1992]

Lange, Marc, " " Paper forthcoming in Philosophy of Science .

Langton, Chris G, "Artificial Life" from Artificial Life , Chris Langton, ed. SFI Studies in the Sciences of Complexity, Proc. Vol. VI. Redwood City, CA: Addison-Wesley, 1989. {The original discussion of theoretical issues in ALife, particularly interesting is the discussion of AI and ALife. -bk}

Langton, Chris G., "Introduction" from Artificial Life II , Chris Langton, C. Taylor, J.D. Farmer, & S. Rasmussen, eds. SFI Studies in the Sciences of Complexity, Proc. Vol. X. Redwood City, CA: Addison-Wesley, 1991. {pp. 19-21 discuss philosophy papers in volume. -bk}

Levy, Steven, Artificial Life: The Quest for a New Creation , 1992. {"Popular Science" book overviewing ALife. Contains some discussion of ethical issues. -bk}

Levy, Steven, "A-Life Nightmare". Whole Earth Review , No. 76 (Fall 1992) 34-47. {This article is an outtake from (Levy 1992), in which he discusses the possible ethical worst-case implications of ALife with Doyne Farmer, Steen Rasmussen, Chris Langton, Danny Hillis, and Norman Packard. This issue has two other lengthy "popular science"-style articles on ALife. -bk}

Manderick, Bernard, "Selectionist Systems as Cognitive Systems." In Francisco J. Varela and Paul Bourgine, eds. Toward a Practice of Autonomous Systems: Proceedings of the First European Conference on Artificial Life . MIT Press (A Bradford Book), 1992: 441-447.

Marchal, Bruno, "Amoeba, Planaria, and Dreaming Machines." In Francisco J. Varela and Paul Bourgine, eds. Toward a Practice of Autonomous Systems: Proceedings of the First European Conference on Artificial Life . MIT Press (A Bradford Book), 1992: 429-440.

Maturana, Humberto R. and Varela, Francisco J., Autopoesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living . Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Vol. 42. Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Co., 1980. {The technical, detailed presentation of an autopoetic theory of biology, in which living systems are seen as "self creators." -bk}

Maturana, Humberto R. and Varela, Francisco J., The Tree of Knowledge . Shambala, Boston. {The "popular" version of Autopoesis. -bk}

Mayr, E.  The Growth of Biological Thought . Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982. {Contains a list and discussion of potential behavioural criteria of life. -bk}

Morris, Harold C. "On the Feasibility of Computational Artificial Life: A reply to critics", Animals to Animats , 1991, pp 4?-49). {A rather unconvincing response to the philosophical worries of Cariani, Rosen, and Pattee. -bk}

Morris, Harold C. Formal Sciences Approach to Artificial Life . Book Manuscript on submission, 1990. (Cited in Morris, 1991. -bk)

Pattee, H. H. "Simulations, Realizations, and Theories of Life." In Artificial Life , 1989. {Pattee argues that living systems are those which make "measurements," in the sense of quantum physics probability-wave-collapsings. -bk}

Pattee, H.H. (1996), "The problem of observables in models of biological organizations". From Evolution, Order, and Complexity , Elias L. Khalil and Kenneth E. Boulding, eds., London: Routledge, 1996. (In press)

Pattee, H. H. (1995) "Evolving self-reference: matter, symbols, and semantic closure". Communication and Cognition - Artificial Intelligence , 12 (1-2) , 9-28.

Pattee, H. H. (1995) "Artificial life needs a real epistemology" . In Advances in Artificial Life . F. Moran, A. Moreno, J. J. Morelo, and P. Chacon, eds., Springer-Verlag, Berlin, pp. 23-38.

Paton, R.C., Nwana, H.S., Shave, M.J.R., and Bench-Capon, T.J.M., "Computing at the Tissue/Organ Level (with Particular Reference to the Liver)." In Francisco J. Varela and Paul Bourgine, eds. Toward a Practice of Autonomous Systems: Proceedings of the First European Conference on Artificial Life . MIT Press (A Bradford Book), 1992: 411-420.

Peschl, Markus F. "Autonomy vs. Environmental Dependency in Neural Knowledge Representaation." In Artificial Life IV , Rodney A. Brooks and Pattie Maes, eds. MIT Press (A Bradford Book), 1994: 417-423. {An analysis of the role of knowledge representation in neural nets and ALife systems. -bk}

Prigogine, I. & Stengers, I. Order out of Chaos {theoretical foundations of information and complexity in living systems -ML}

Putnam, Hilary, ™Robots: Machines or artificially created life?∫ Journal of Philosophy , 1964. (Early article on the philosophical issues in the creation of artificial life. -bk)

Rasmussen, Steen, "Aspects of Information, Life, Reality, and Physics." In Artificial Life II , 1990. (Rather sketchy discussion of some big issues. -bk)

Rosen, R. "Some Epistemological Issues in Physics and Biology."

Rosen, Robert, Dynamical System Theory in Biology , Wiley-Interscience (John Wiley and Sons, Inc.), 1970.

Rosen, R. Fundamentals of Measurement and Representation of Natural Systems . New York: North Holland, 1978.

Rosen, R. Life Itself: A Comprehensive Inquiry into the Nature, Origin, and Fabication of Life . New York: Columbia University Press, 1992. {Formal biology. In other words, lots of axioms and proofs, but only a single reference to a biological source. Seems like "castle-in-the-air" stuff to me, but some people I respect swear by it. -bk}

Schrodinger, E. What is Life? . Cambridge, 1943.

Smithers, Tim "Taking Eliminative Materialism Seriously: A Methodology for Autonomous Systems Research." In Francisco J. Varela and Paul Bourgine, eds. Toward a Practice of Autonomous Systems: Proceedings of the First European Conference on Artificial Life . MIT Press (A Bradford Book), 1992:31-40 {Like the title says, an application of EM to theoretical robotics. -bk}

Sober, Elliot, "Learning from Functionalism: Prospects for Strong Artificial Life." In Artificial Life II , edited by C. Langton, C. Taylor, J.D. Farmer, & S. Rasmussen. SFI Studies in the Sciences of Complexity, Proc. Vol. X. Redwood City, CA: Addison-Wesley, 1991. {Discussion and defense of an artificial intelligence-style functionalism approach to ALife. Keeley 1994/1995 is, in part, a response. -bk}

Stewart, John, "Life = Cognition: The Epistemological and Ontological Significance of Artificial Life." In Francisco J. Varela and Paul Bourgine, eds. Toward a Practice of Autonomous Systems: Proceedings of the First European Conference on Artificial Life. MIT Press (A Bradford Book), 1992: 475-483.

Todd, Stephan and Latham, William, "Artificial Life or Surreal Art?" In Francisco J. Varela and Paul Bourgine, eds. Toward a Practice of Autonomous Systems: Proceedings of the First European Conference on Artificial Life . MIT Press (A Bradford Book), 1992: 504-513.

von Neuman, J. Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata , edited and completed by A.W. Burks. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1966. {Introduction to cellular automata and its application to biology.}

Webb, Barbara and Smithers, Tim, "The Connection between AI and Biology in the Study of Behavior." In Francisco J. Varela and Paul Bourgine, eds. Toward a Practice of Autonomous Systems: Proceedings of the First European Conference on Artificial Life . MIT Press (A Bradford Book), 1992: 421-428.

Key to annotations:

bk = Brian Keeley
ML = Mike Lash
au = the author of the work


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