Artificial Life
Open problems in artificial life
Artificial Life - Special issue on the Artificial Life VII: looking backward, looking forward
Creation: Life and how to Make It
Creation: Life and how to Make It
Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again
Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again
Knowledge Growth in an Artificial Animal
Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Genetic Algorithms
Robust artificial life via artificial programmed death
Artificial Intelligence
Artificial life, death and epidemics in evolutionary, generative electronic art
EC'05 Proceedings of the 3rd European conference on Applications of Evolutionary Computing
Cognitive paradigms: which one is the best?
Cognitive Systems Research
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This paper discusses how concepts developed within artificial life (ALife) can help demystify the notion of death. This is relevant because sooner or later we will all die; death affects us all. Studying the properties of living systems independently of their substrate, ALife describes life as a type of organization. Thus, death entails the loss of that organization. Within this perspective, different notions of death are derived from different notions of life. Also, the relationship between life and mind and the implications of death to the mind are discussed. A criterium is proposed in which the value of life depends on its uniqueness, i.e. a living system is more valuable if it is harder to replace. However, this does not imply that death in replaceable living systems is unproblematic. This is decided on whether there is harm to the system produced by death. The paper concludes with speculations about how the notion of death could be shaped in the future.