Re: Maps and territories

feedbackdroid wrote:

What does matter is when you produce a mathematical "description" of a
physical or biological process. It's just a description, and not the
process.

People also presented that kind of argument to Chris Langton -
when he claimed that some artificial life models were really alive.
Not /simulated/ life, or a /model/ of life, actually alive:

``any definition or list of criteria broad enough to include all
known biological life will also include certain classes of
computer processes, which, therefore, will have to be
considered 'actually' alive.''

- http://tal.forum2.org/alife

An example of such an objection:

``Artificial life can take two forms: synthetic and virtual.
In principle, the materials and properties of synthetic
living systems could differ radically from those of natural
living systems yet still resemble them enough to be really
alive if they are grounded in the relevant causal interactions
with the real world. Virtual (purely computational) "living"
systems, in contrast, are just ungrounded symbol systems that
are systematically interpretable as if they were alive; in
reality they are no more alive than a virtual furnace is hot.''

- http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/harnad/Papers/Harnad/harnad93.artlife.html

However, on the basis of the definition of life that states that
which evolves is alive, Langton was completely correct. Simulations
exist - they are just as real as anything else.

Because what was being described was fundamentally mathematical,
a computer simulation was just as much an instance of the process
as that which it modelled.
--
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Relevant Pages

  • Re: Maps and territories
    ... physical or biological process. ... People also presented that kind of argument to Chris Langton - ... ``Artificial life can take two forms: ... living systems could differ radically from those of natural ...
    (comp.ai.philosophy)
  • Re: New Discipline: Synthetic Biology
    ... > through the use of human-made analogs of living systems. ... > the Synthesis and Simulation of Living Systems" (otherwise ... > known as Artificial Life I) at the Los Alamos National ... of artificial living organisms are covered by the term. ...
    (sci.bio.evolution)
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