The success of Artificial Life depends on whether it will help solving the conceptual problems of biology. Biology may be viewed as the science of the transformation of organizations. And, yet, biology lacks a theory of organization. We use this as an example of the challenge that Artificial Life must meet. "If - as I believe - physics and chemistry are conceptually inadequate as a theoretical framework for biology, it is because they lack the concept of function, and hence that of organization. [...] [P]erhaps, therefore, we should give the [...] computer scientists more of a say in the formulation of Theoretical Biology." -- Christopher Longuet-Higgins, 1969 [29] 1 Life and the organization problem in biology There are two readings of "life": "life" as an embodied phenomenon and "life" as a concept. Foucault [20] points out that up to the end of the eighteenth century life does not exist: only living beings. Living beings are but a class in the series of all things in the world. T...

INTRODUCTION: THE POSSIBILITY OF NATURAL HERMENEUTICS This is a lecture, which explains the informal language and sketchiness of the text. The paper deals with the idea of hermeneutics from the viewpoint of practical biology and cognitive science. This requires some clarification. Traditionally, the above mentioned disciplines, like many others, utilize little more than basic empiry and computational modeling. Philosophy is seldom cited, if ever; in particular, hermeneutics enters virtually nowhere except, perhaps, in the study of the making of biology. What the present paper suggests is something very different in spirit, namely, that hermeneutic concepts should play an important role in biology proper. The hypothesis is that hermeneutics should appear not just as a study tool of, but in biology. What will be outlined below is not the first presentation of this idea: the basic material comes from two earlier publications, a book

this paper I deal with certain issues of internal observation, an idea recently amplified in the concept of "Endophysics" 1 . The basic thought is disarmingly simple: it is the study of systems by experimenters and theorists who find themselves inside the very systems studied, scientists who collect data and form theories from a intimate yet limiting perspective of containment. Despite the utter triviality of this idea (for we are such observers in our Universe), I believe there is a potential in it for the renewal of philosopical naturalism and for the rethinking of basic aspects of the scientific method. We will understand this in a moment with the help of the perennial metaphor of the black box of cybernetics. A "black box" is any system that we examine exclusively by what it reveals about itself in terms of relations to some external states of affairs, called the inputs and the outputs. The usual point in the black box story is that under very mild conditions the "blackness" of the box (that is, that we don't know what's inside) can be undone, and the internal structure of the box can be discovered, thereby yielding, well, a "white box" which is transparent for us. More than a marginal result of engineering, this is a big success for scientific epistemology. A form of black-boxing playes a central role in science. Consider how we obtain our knowledge in the laboratory. In comes the experimental question, out goes the empirical result. The magic in between is done by Nature behind the veil, so we don' t know it in the first place. How the magic is done we learn by forming theories to fill the gaps between the two ends. The black box legend tells us that theories have a good chance to succeed. Yet life is more complicated than we'd like. There are bad news: we soon ...

ABSTRACT. Emergence is defined as a process which cannot be described by a fixed model, consisting of invariant distinctions. Hence emergence must be described by a metamodel, representing the transition of one model to another one by means of a distinction dynamics. The dynamics of distinctions is based on the processes of variation and selection, resulting in an invariant distinction, which constrains the variety of and thus defines a new system. A classification of emergence processes is proposed, based on the following criteria: amount of variety, internality / externality of variation and selection, number of levels, and contingency of constraint. It is argued that traditional formal and computational models are incapable of representing the more general types of emergence, but that it is possible to generalize them on the basis of the dynamics of distinctions.