In a faux adobe building in Santa Fe, N.M., some say evolution is going on. Scientists peer at creatures fighting, mating, replicating, mutating, struggling to emerge from the primordial soup. But this mini-Cambrian explosion is digitized, the tiny creatures are computer programs, and the window onto their silicon universe is a flickering screen.
Welcome to the world of Artificial Life, where most of the gods are atheists, but creation stories abound.
The Santa Fe Institute for the Sciences of Complexity is at the ethnographic center of Stefan Helmreich’s new book, Silicon Second Nature: Culturing Artificial Life in a Digital World (University of California Press; 314 pages; $29.95). The author, a lecturer in anthropology at Stanford University, explores the world view that has made many Artificial Life researchers see their computer simulations as the creation of real life in real worlds. Part of that mindset is a concept of life as information processing. Or as the A.L. pioneer Christopher Langton put it, life “is a property of the organization of matter, rather than a property of matter itself.” Along with Mr. Langton, A.L. creators discussed at some length include John Holland, and his Echo system, and Tom Ray, and Tierra.
The core of A.L. researchers at the institute was formed by physicists from Los Alamos National Laboratory. “According to quantum mechanics, the only thing that truly exists in the universe is pattern,” writes Mr. Helmreich. “Because many of the founders of Artificial Life are theoretical physicists, this view of reality as physical, quantum mechanical pattern suffuses their thinking and influences how they construe their computer simulations.”
Another central theme in the book is how A.L. models are shaped by the researchers’ backgrounds and wider social influences, including the counterculture of the 1960s and early ‘70s. And although most of the scientists the author talked to were self-described atheists, creation stories and other theological imagery were recurrent motifs in the A.L. world (as were masculine-centered motifs of colonization and procreation). Describing A.L. programmers as gods was a frequent strategy, he says, and “not just a playful way of speaking but a move that granted programmers the authority to erase their own presence as the beings who gave their simulations meanings as worlds.” In that way the programmers occupy the transcendent position of the “unmoved mover,” he notes, echoing the Deist conception of the divine watchmaker.
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Section: Research & Publishing
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