The garden in the machine: the emerging science of artificial life
The garden in the machine: the emerging science of artificial life
The Philosophy of Artificial Life
The Philosophy of Artificial Life
Artificial Life II
Computer viruses as artificial life
Artificial Life
Levels of functional equivalence in reverse bioengineering
Artificial Life
Problems for a Philosophy of Software Engineering
Minds and Machines
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This article concerns the claim that it is possible to create living organisms, not merely models that represent organisms, simply by programming computers ("virtual" strong alife). I ask what sort of things these computer-generated organisms are supposed to be (where are they, and what are they made of?). I consider four possible answers to this question: (a) The organisms are abstract complexes of pure information; (b) they are material objects made of bits of computer hardware; (c) they are physical processes going on inside the computer; and (d) they are denizens of an entire artificial world, different from our own, that the programmer creates. I argue that (a) could not be right, that (c) collapses into (b), and that (d) would make strong alife either absurd or uninteresting. Thus, "virtual" strong alife amounts to the claim that, by programming a computer, one can literally bring bits of its hardware to life.