Synthetic Ethology: An Approach to the Study of Communication

Abstract

A complete understanding of communication, language, intentionality and related mental phenomena will require a theory integrating mechanistic explanations with ethological phenomena. For the foreseeable future, the complexities of natural life in its natural environment will preclude such an understanding. An approach more conducive to carefully controlled experiments and to the discovery of deep laws of great generality is to study synthetic life forms in a synthetic world to which they have become coupled through evolution. This is the approach of synthetic ethology. Some simple synthetic ethology experiments are described in which we have observed the evolution of communication in a population of simple machines. We show that Artificial Life II: The Second Workshop on the Synthesis and Simulation of Living Systems, Santa Fe Institute Studies in the Sciences of Complexity, proceedings Vol. X, edited by Christopher G. Langton, Charles Taylor, J. Doyne Farmer, and Steen Rasmussen. ...

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