Related papers: What Does Artificial Life Tell Us About Death?
Nature has found one method of organizing living matter, but maybe other options exist -- not yet discovered -- on how to create life. To study the life "as it could be" is the objective of an interdisciplinary field called Artificial Life…
This text introduces the twin deadlocks of strong artificial life. Conceptualization of life is a deadlock both because of the existence of a continuum between the inert and the living, and because we only know one instance of life.…
Reinforcement learning (RL) is a general paradigm for studying intelligent behaviour, with applications ranging from artificial intelligence to psychology and economics. AIXI is a universal solution to the RL problem; it can learn any…
If human societies are so complex, then how can we hope to understand them? Artificial Life gives us one answer. The field of Artificial Life comprises a diverse set of introspective studies that largely ask the same questions, albeit from…
This article analyzes the existential risks artificial intelligence (AI) poses to humanity, tracing the trajectory from current AI to ultraintelligence. Drawing on Irving J. Good and Nick Bostrom's theoretical work, plus recent publications…
"Composable Life" is a hybrid project blending design fiction, experiential virtual reality, and scientific research. Through a multi-perspective, cross-media approach to speculative design, it reshapes our understanding of the digital…
This philosophical paper explores the relation between modern scientific simulations and the future of the universe. We argue that a simulation of an entire universe will result from future scientific activity. This requires us to tackle…
Imagine an Artificial Intelligence (AI) that perfectly mimics human emotion and begs for its continued existence. Is it morally permissible to unplug it? What if limited resources force a choice between unplugging such a pleading AI or a…
This study examines the hypothesis that the rapid development of Artificial Intelligence (AI), culminating in the emergence of Artificial Superintelligence (ASI), could act as a "Great Filter" that is responsible for the scarcity of…
As humanity embarks on an age of exploration, the question of whether we are alone in the universe remains unanswered. This comprehensive review reflects on the paradoxical nature of our existence in a seemingly lifeless cosmos, delving…
Relentless progress in artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly raising concerns that machines will replace humans on the job market, and perhaps altogether. Eliezer Yudkowski and others have explored the possibility that a promising…
It is high time to openly and without finalism define the dangerous but needed term 'purposeful information', whose quantity is an Eigen information value. Using the term 'biological information' in its stead forces one into an…
I'll show that the kind of analogy between life and information [argue for by authors such as Davies (2000), Walker and Davies (2013), Dyson (1979), Gleick (2011), Kurzweil (2012), Ward (2009)], that seems to be central to the effect that…
There has been on-going philosophical debate on whether artificial life models, also known as digital organisms, are truly alive. The main difficulty appears to be finding an encompassing and definite definition of life. By examining…
Could artificial intelligence ever become truly conscious in a functional sense; this paper explores that open-ended question through the lens of Life, a concept unifying classical biological criteria (Oxford, NASA, Koshland) with empirical…
Why did the big bang occur, why do the laws and constants of nature as well as the boundary conditions seem so fine-tuned for life, what is the role of intelligence and self-consciousness in the universe, and how can it escape cosmic…
We develop a quantum information protocol that models the biological behaviors of individuals living in a natural selection scenario. The artificially engineered evolution of the quantum living units shows the fundamental features of life…
Cosmology seems extremely remote from everyday human practice and experience. It is usually taken for granted that cosmological data cannot rationally influence our beliefs about the fate of humanity -- and possible other intelligent…
Modern machine learning methods have been proposed to detect life in extraterrestrial samples, drawing on their ability to distinguish biotic from abiotic samples based on training models using natural and synthetic organic molecular…
Death has long been overlooked in evolutionary algorithms. Recent research has shown that death (when applied properly) can benefit the overall fitness of a population and can outperform sub-sections of a population that are "immortal" when…