Abstract
What is artificial life? Much has been said about this interesting collection of efforts to artificially simulate and synthesize lifelike behavior and processes, yet we are far from having a robust philosophical understanding of just what Alifers are doing and why it ought to interest philosophers of science, and philosophers of biology in particular. In this paper, I first provide three introductory examples from the particular subset of artificial life I focus on, known as ‘soft Alife’ (s-Alife), and follow up with a more in-depth review of the Avida program, which serves as my case study of s-Alife. Next, I review three well-known accounts of thought experiments, and then offer my own synthesized account, to make the argument that s-Alife functions as thought experimentation in biology. I draw a comparison between the methodology of the thought-experimental world that yields real-world results, and the s-Alife research that informs our understanding of natural life. I conclude that the insights provided by s-Alife research have the potential to fundamentally alter our understanding of the nature of organic life and thus deserve the attention of both philosophers and natural scientists.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Though I have argued elsewhere (Stillwaggon 2006) that hard Alife, especially Brooks’ embodied robotics, provides an attractive antidote to philosophy of mind’s traditional thought experiments which make the dubious presumption that it is coherent to talk about disembodied yet conscious experience.
See for example the essays in Margaret Boden’s anthology, The Philosophy of Artificial Life, which concern the theoretical and epistemological implications of Alife research. For those a bit more technically-minded, I recommend the collection of articles by Rodney Brooks (some of which are coauthored), who is adept at explaining his revolutionary methods in robotics to those lacking a scientific background; see for example Brooks (1991).
Which on my account (2002) requires that the conditions of the thought experiment be new, relevant, and comprehensive, so that the object of inquiry is mentally manipulated in ways which are novel, reveal something useful, and take into account as many relevant variables as possible.
This comparison comes from Christopher Langton, who organized the first Artificial Life workshop in Los Alamos in 1987. His comprehensive manifesto on the research field is reprinted in Boden (1996).
Lenski et al’s 2008 constitutes an excellent example of how scientific experimentation and thought experimentation can work in tandem. The team used strains of E. coli to trace the evolution of a citrate-using (Cit+) ability in the organisms and discovered, by “replaying” evolution from different points in each strain’s development, that historical contingencies were highly influential in the ultimate evolution of Cit+. This empirical work with organic media nicely reflects the team’s experimental conclusions from their earlier research with Avida; in particular the fact that although there were several possible trajectories in the ultimate development of the EQU function, there were nevertheless specific genes that had to be in place for its development to occur at all.
Bergson 1911.
References
Bedau M (1996) The nature of life. In: Boden M (ed) The philosophy of artificial life. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp 332–357
Bedau M (2004) How to understand the question ‘what is life? In: Bedau M, Husbands P, Hutton T, Kumar S, Suzuki H (eds) Workshop and tutorial proceedings, ninth international conference on the simulation and synthesis of living systems (Alife IX). Boston, MA, pp 126–129
Bergson H (1911) Creative evolution. Tr., Arthur Mitchell (New York: Dover, 1998 [1911])
Boden M (1996) The philosophy of artificial life. Oxford university press, Oxford
Brooks R (1991) Intelligence without representation. In: Haugeland J (ed) Mind design II. The MIT Press, Cambridge, pp 395–420
Brown JR (1991) The laboratory of the mind. Routledge, New York
Dennett D (1994) Artificial life as philosophy. Artif Life 1:291–292
Emmeche C (1994) Garden in the machine. Princeton University Press, Princeton
Fox Keller E (2003) Models, simulation, and computer experiments. In: Radder H (ed) The philosophy of scientific experimentation. University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh
Gardner M (1970) Mathematical games: the fantastic combinations of john conway’s new solitaire game life. Sci Am 223:120–123
Hughes RIG (1999) The ising model, computer simulation, and universal physics. In: Morgan M, Morrison M (eds) Models as mediators. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
Kuhn TS (1977) The essential tension. University of Chicago Press, Chicago
Langton C (1996) Artificial life. In: Boden M (ed) The philosophy of artificial life. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp 39–94
Lenhard J (2004) Nanoscience and the janus-faced character of simulations. In: Baird D, Nordmann A, Schummer J (eds) Discovering the nanoscale. IOS Press, Amsterdam
Lenski RE, Ofria C, Pennock RT, Adami C (2004) The evolutionary origin of complex features. Nature 423:139–144
Norton J (2004) Why thought experiments do not transcend empiricism. In: Hitchcock C (ed) Contemporary debates in philosophy of science. Blackwell, Oxford, pp 44–66
Peirce CS (1958) Collected papers. In: Hartshorne C, Weib P (eds) Band I–VI. Harvard University Press, Boston, pp 1931–1935 Band VII, VIII. Burks AW (ed)
Ray T (1995) An evolutionary approach to synthetic biology: zen and the art of creating life. In: Langton C (ed) Artificial life: an overview. The MIT Press, Cambridge, p 196
Reynolds C (1987) Flocks, herds, and schools: a distributed behavioral model, in computer graphics. In: SIGGRAPH 1987 conference proceedings, 21(4): 25–34
Rohrlich F (1991) Computer simulations in the physical sciences, PSA 1990, vol 2. The Philosophy of Science Association, East Lansing, pp 507–518
Sorensen RA (1998) Thought experiments. Oxford University Press, London
Stillwaggon L (2002) Delivering fact from fiction: the epistemological value of scientific thought experiments. Philosophy Masters Thesis, San Francisco State University, unpublished
Stillwaggon L (2006) How does alife inform the mind-body problem? In: Artificial intelligence and the simulation of behavior quarterly, vol 123. Winter/Spring, p 8
Winsberg E (2003) Simulated experiments: methodology for a virtual world. Philos Sci 70:105–125
Acknowledgment
I would like to extend my sincere thanks to the anonymous reviewer who put almost as much work into this paper as I did.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Swan, L.S. Synthesizing insight: artificial life as thought experimentation in biology. Biol Philos 24, 687–701 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-009-9156-z
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-009-9156-z