ABSTRACT:
A number of approaches have recently been proposed for the task of modeling life -- as opposed to intelligence. The problems posed by the two tasks have interesting points of contact and difference. One analogy has often been noted: like AI, AL's ambit ions might be either strong or weak
The strong aspiration is actually to create life; the weak, merely to study life with models and simulations. The word `artificial' fits equally well either way: artificial flowers are not flowers, but artificial light is real light. One disanalogy , however, is that there is nothing in Artificial Life that parallels the problem of consciousness in artificial intelligence. Another is that information is more plausibly construed as the basis stuff of thought than as the basic stuff of life. Th is is so because life seems to involve particular existence in space and time, whereas information remains abstract in ways that may seem to preclude life. In this paper, I develop and explain this problem, arguing, in effect, for a materialist con ception of life, which means that computer programs as such can't hope to be alive in the literal sense, because they do not constitute individuals located in particular stretches of time.