Artificial Life as Philosophy

Abstract

more important and promising. Philosophers have always trafficked in thought experiments, putatively conclusive arguments about what is possible, necessary, and impossible under various assumptions. The cases that philosophers have been able to make using these methods are notoriously inconclusive. What stands to reason or is obvious in various complex scenarios is quite often more an artifact of the bias and limitations of the philosopher's imagination than the dictate of genuine logical insight. Artificial Life, like its parent (aunt?) discipline, Artificial Intelligence, can be conceived as a sort of philosophy—the creation and testing of elaborate thought experiments, kept honest by requirements that could never be imposed on the naked mind of a human thinker acting alone. In short, Artificial Life research is the creation of prosthetically controlled thought experiments of indefinite complexity. This is a great way of confirming or disconfirming many of the intuitions or hunches that otherwise have to pass as data for the sorts of conceptual investigations that define the subject matter of philosophy. Philosophers who see this opportunity will want to leap into the field, at whatever level of abstraction suits their interests, and gird their conceptual loins with the simulational virtuosity of computers. But perhaps some philosophers won't see the field this way. They will disagree with this assessment of mine or will worry about some of its presuppositions and implications, and, for them, Artificial Life will appear to be just one more controversial object in the world in need of philosophical analysis, criticism, defense, categorization. What are the n defining doctrines of the Artificial Life creed, and what can be said in defense or criticism of them? Already the stirrings of discussion about whether one wants to distinguish strong AL from one or another variety of weak AL can be heard in the corridors of philosophy. No doubt there is some useful work to be done identifying the popular misconceptions of the field and exposing them, scolding the overambitious partisans on both sides, and clarifying the actual products, as well as the prospects, of work in the field. It would be a shame, however, if this conceptual policeman role were to be the dominant contribution philosophers make to the field. If we draw the boundaries of Artificial Life rather broadly, there are many quite traditional philosophical issues in the philosophy of biology, of science, of mind, and

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