Contents of Philosophy of Artificial Life

Preface
Abstract
Chapter 1: Introduction
1. The rise of Artificial Life and its basic thoughts
2. The philosophical problems raised by Artificial Life
3. The value of researching philosophy of artificial Life
4. Current status of researching philosophy of Artificial Life and some unanswering questions
5. The structure of this book
Chapter 2: The logic of life and the thought foundation of Artificial Life
1. The essence of mechanic process
2. The logic of self-reproduction
3. Game of Life and “Life Computer”
4. Information dynamics and life at the edge of chaos
Chapter 3: Methodology of Construction of artificial life
1. Synthetic method
2. From local to global
3. Genetic algorithm
4. Computer simulation experiment: new methodological revolution of artificial life and complex science
5. Becoming and mergence
6. A new thinking paradigm: individual-based thinking
Chapter 4: Virtual artificial life: from “Core War” to “Amoeba World”
1. “Core War”
2. Computer Virus and Computer worm
3. Tierra: Man playing God
4. “Amoeba World”
Chapter 5: Realistic artificial life: from automatic agents to evolutionary robot
1. Classical research of Artificial Intelligence and its problems
2. Behavior-based research of autonomous robot
3. Artificial neural net research
4. Evolutionary robot research: the combination of virtuality and reality
Chapter 6: Definition of life and the possibility of strong artificial life
1. The difficulty of defining life
2. “Life-as-we-know-it”
3. Two methods of defining life
4. Four “fundamental properties” definition
5. The possibility of strong artificial life
Chapter 7: The ontological status of strong artificial life
1. The realness of virtuality
2. Theoretical argument for the realness of artificial life
3. Godel’s theorem and strong artificial life
Chapter 8: Towards computationalism
1. Information, algorithm, and computation
2. The essence of computation
3. Cognition and computation
4. Life and computation
5. Universe and computation
6. Refutations to some opposite ideas
7. Conclusion
Acknowledgement