On The Emergent Life View Of Artificial Life

In the broadest sense,artificial life refers to man-made life,which is different from natural life formed organically by carbohydrates.Artificial life is the study of how to understand life by extracting basic dynamic rules from biological phenomena,and reconstructing these phenomena on physical media such as computers,making it a new manipulable experimental method.Although artificial life appears as an interdisciplinary subject of computer and biology,it also has a complicated and close relationship with philosophical thinking.On the one hand,philosophical thought has injected important enlightenment into the birth of artificial life;On the other hand,the development of artificial life has also promoted the research of artificial life philosophy.It is in the deep interaction with philosophy that artificial life research has continuously enriched and promoted our understanding of life.Starting from the self-organization example of artificial life,this paper describes two classical models.One is the bird model,the other is the life game model.The author believes that the bird flock model is a good introduction example to show readers the research of artificial life.The bird flock in the computer system not only maintains a highly consistent behavior with the natural bird flock,but also shows the preliminary abstract process from the natural system to the computer system.This example leads readers to think about the relationship between individual and group behavior,part and whole.The second example is the life game model based on cellular automata,which shows that the soft artificial life completely highlights the life phenomenon by the system,and completely gets rid of the "suspicion" of natural simulation.This is a more abstract process to guide readers to further think about macro and micro problems.As a classical model,life game can summarize many philosophical connotations of emergence theory from its system mechanism,which are deeply expounded and repeatedly mentioned in the predictable,interpretable and downward causality parts of chapters 3 and 4.Taking this model as the core,it runs through the research of life emergence mechanism of artificial life system,and discusses the emergence theory program in the field of artificial life from the perspectives of epistemology and ontology.As a emergent system of complexity science,it is appropriate to divide artificial life into two levels: epistemology and ontology.This method is consistent with the emerging research of other complex system sciences such as artificial intelligence.Epistemology shows that the emerging phenomenon of artificial life can be explained and predicted to a certain extent.This paper discusses the emergence theory of artificial life,especially the weak emergence view,from the perspective of epistemology.Through the discussion of the interpretation ability and prediction ability of emergence,especially the weak emergence,this paper explains the concepts of "principle" and "practicality" in the weak emergence view,as well as the view that simulation can not be restored,so as to answer how life comes into being.Ontology is expressed as: the downward causal effect of the emergence product on the emergence matrix.This explains the origin of the autonomy of the system from simple input to complex output.In the early emergence theorists,the emergence process is a black box,which can observe sub-level input and high-level output,but they don’t know how to transform them in the emergence process.This paper attempts to use artificial life as the "key" to open the "black box" of emergence theory.The answer of "downward causality" is placed in the black box,and the emergence system obtains the autonomy at the ontological level.Then return to the vision of artificial life,demonstrate the reality of artificial life products through the autonomy of artificial life system,and discuss "whether to endow them with ontological status,if so,what status to endow",so as to form a logical closed loop of the topic of "emergent view of life of artificial life".Finally,on the basis of the reality of artificial life,it is of great significance to reflect on the current understanding of the essence of life by studying the limitation and demarcation of artificial life.Similarly,ethics is an unavoidable problem in life.It involves not only the moral position of artificial life itself,but also the challenge to the traditional technical ethics and bioethics.It is also the reflection on the philosophy of science and the rethinking of man and nature.