Artificial life needs a real epistemology

Abstract

Foundational controversies in artificial life and artificial intelligence arise from lack of decidable criteria for defining the epistemic cuts that separate knowledge of reality from reality itself, e.g., description from construction, simulation from realization, mind from brain. Selective evolution began with a description-construction cut, i.e., the genetically coded synthesis of proteins. The highly evolved cognitive epistemology of physics requires an epistemic cut between reversible dynamic laws and the irreversible process of measuring initial conditions. This is also known as the measurement problem. Good physics can be done without addressing this epistemic problem, but not good biology and artificial life, because open-ended evolution requires the physical implementation of genetic descriptions. The course of evolution depends on the speed and reliability of this implementation, or how efficiently the real or artificial physical dynamics can be harnessed by nondynamic genetic symbols.