Brenner A. (2011) Living life and making life. In: Tymieniecka A.-T. (ed.) Phenomenology/ontopoiesis retrieving geo-cosmic horizons of antiquity: Logos and life. Springer, Dordrecht: 91–102. https://cepa.info/5705
The question “What is life?” has long been a major discussion point in all cultures. Nowadays whilst both Synthetic Biology and the Computer Sciences are trying to create life the question on life is becoming even more important. In oder to answer this question the paper will present the biophilosophy of Humberto Maturana and Francesco Varela. The paper aims to display that this biophilosophy is very close to Husserlian phenomenology. It will be shown that a living system is autonomous and an creation by its own and dependent from its environment which is made by the living entity itself. Living entities cannot be understood without their own logos.
Callebaut W. (2012) Scientific perspectivism: A philosopher of science’s response to the challenge of big data biology. Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 43: 69–80.
Big data biology – bioinformatics, computational biology, systems biology (including “omics”), and synthetic biology – raises a number of issues for the philosophy of science. This article deals with several, such as: Is data-intensive biology a new kind of science, presumably post-reductionistic? To what extent is big data biology data-driven? Can data “speak for themselves?” I discuss these issues by way of a reflection on Carl Woese’s worry that “a society that permits biology to become an engineering discipline, that allows science to slip into the role of changing the living world without trying to understand it, is a danger to itself.” And I argue that scientific perspectivism, a philosophical stance represented prominently by Giere, Van Fraassen, and Wimsatt, according to which science cannot as a matter of principle transcend our human perspective, provides the best resources currently at our disposal to tackle many of the philosophical issues implied in the modeling of complex, multilevel/multiscale phenomena. Relevance: Many interesting things can be learned about the irreducibly human nature of scientific knowledge in a perspectivist stance (“view from somewhere”) while avoiding futile constructivism vs. realism debates. Qua perspectivists, constructive empiricists à la Van Fraassen and constructive realists à la Giere can cooperate in a profitable way.
Damiano L. & Stano P. (2018) Synthetic biology and artificial intelligence: Grounding a cross-disciplinary approach to the synthetic exploration of (embodied) cognition. Complex Systems 27: 199–228. https://cepa.info/7614
Recent scientific developments – the emergence in the 1990s of a “body- centered” artificial intelligence (AI) and the birth in the 2000s of synthetic biology (SB) – allow and require the constitution of a new cross-disciplinary synergy, that elsewhere we called “SB-AI.” In this paper, we define the motivation, possibilities, limits and methodologies of this line of research. Based on the insufficiencies of embodied AI, we draw on frontier developments in synthetic cells SB to introduce a promising research program in SB-AI, which we define as Chemical Autopoietic AI. As we emphasize, the promise of this approach is twofold: building organizationally relevant wetware models of minimal biological-like systems, and contributing to the exploration of (embodied) cognition and to the full realization of the “embodiment turn” in contemporary AI.
Damiano L. & Stano P. (2018) Understanding embodied cognition by building models of minimal life: Preparatory steps and a preliminary autopoietic framework. In: Pelillo M., Poli I., Roli A., Serra R., Slanzi D., Villani M. & Poli I. (eds.) Artificial life and evolutionary computation: Proceedings of the 12th Italian Workshop, WIVACE 2017, Venice, Italy, 19-21 September 2017, Revised Selected Papers. Springer, Cham: 73–87. https://cepa.info/5520
A novel scenario is emerging from the synthetic biology advancements of the last fifteen years. We refer to a well-defined multidisciplinary sci-tech arena dedicated to the construction of biological-like systems, and, in particular, microscopic cell-like systems. The challenge of assembling a minimal cell from separated parts is generally considered the Holy Grail of biology. However, an accurate analysis of this emerging line of research, grounded in the theory of autopoiesis and its implications, is able to show its potentially high relevance for two other fields – artificial life and artificial intelligence. In this paper we intend to propose this perspective. Based on the critical discussion of recent trends and experimental results in synthetic biology, we sketch out how current research in this field can impact not only artificial life, but also artificial intelligence inquiries, in particular with respect to embodied cognition.
Damiano L. & Stano P. (2021) A wetware embodied AI? Towards an autopoietic organizational approach grounded in synthetic biology. Frontiers in Bioengineering and Biotechnology 9: 724023. https://cepa.info/7615
Damiano L. & Stano P. (2021) Towards autopoietic SB-AI. In: Cejkova J., Holler S., Soros L. & Witkowski O. (eds.) Proceedings of the Artificial Life Conference 2021 (ALIFE 2021). MIT Press, Cambridge MA: 179–181. https://cepa.info/7612
This programmatic paper continues a series of works that we are dedicating to introduce a novel research program in AI, which we call Autopoietic SB-AI to indicate two basic elements of its procedural architecture. (1) The first element is the innovative methodological option of synthetically studying the cognitive domain based on the construction and experimental exploration of wetware – i.e., chemical – models of cognitive processes, using techniques defined in the field of Synthetic Biology (SB). (2) The second element is the theoretical option of developing SB models of cognitive processes based on the theory of autopoiesis. In our previous works we focused on the epistemological and theoretical groundings of Autopoietic SB-AI. In this contribution, after a general presentation of this research program, we introduce the SB technical framework that we are developing to orient Autopoietic SB-AI towards a twofold goal: building organizationally relevant wetware models of minimal biological-like systems (i.e., synthetic cells), and, on this basis, contributing to the scientific exploration of minimal cognition.
Dupuy J.-P. (2018) Cybernetics is an antihumanism: Technoscience and the rebellion against the human condition. In: Loeve S., Guchet X. & Bensaude Vincent B. (eds.) French philosophy of technology: Classical readings and contemporary approaches. Springer, Cham: 139–156.
There is no science that does not rest on a metaphysics, though typically it remains concealed. It is the responsibility of the philosopher to uncover this metaphysics, and then to subject it to criticism. What I have tried to show is that cybernetics, far from being the apotheosis of Cartesian humanism, as Heidegger supposed, actually represented a crucial moment in its demystification, and indeed in its deconstruction.
In the early 1990s pioneer experiments on chemical autopoiesis (self-production) led, on one hand, to the discovery of lipidic micro-compartments and their dynamics as useful models for origins-of-life research, and on the other hand, to the adoption of a systemic perspective in experimental research on minimal living cells. Moreover, the underlying idea of constructing cell models by assembling chemical components (the constructive, or synthetic, approach) has provided an operational field now recognized as bottom-up synthetic biology. This article discusses the origin of chemical autopoiesis and recapitulates the very early experiments, then presents examples of current developments that aim at assembling protocells and artificial/synthetic cells both for basic and applied science.
On the 4th of September 2017, the 14th European Conference on Artificial Life (ECAL 2017, Lyon, France) hosted a satellite workshop dedicated to a frontier research question: ‘What can Synthetic Biology offer to (Embodied) Artificial Intelligence (and vice versa)?’ This workshop, as the previous three of the ‘Synthetic Biology (SB)–Artificial Intelligence (AI)’ workshop series, brought together specialists from different disciplines to address the contemporary debate on the evolution of embodied artificial intelligence from a new angle. In a few words: defining the possible roles that SB – an emerging research line combining biology and engineering – can play in the process of establishment of the so-called ‘Embodied paradigm’ in the scientific exploration of cognition and, in particular, in artificial intelligence.