Artificial Life Needs a Real Epistemology

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. Life is peculiar, said Jeremy. As compared with what? asked the spider. [15] 1. What Can Artificial Life Tell Us About Reality? When a problem persists, unresolved, for centuries in spite of enormous increases in our knowledge, it is a good bet that the problem entails the nature of knowledge itself. The nature of life is one of these problems. Life depends on matter, but life is not an inherent property of matter. Life is peculiar, obviously, because it is so different from nonliving matter. It is different, not so obviously, because it realizes an intrinsic epistemic cut between the genotype and phenotype. Our knowledge of physics, chemistry, molecular biology, genetics, development, and evolution is enormous, but the question persists: Do we really understand how meaning arises from matter? Is it clear why nonliving matter following inexorable universal laws should acquire symbolic genes that construct, control, and evolve new functions and meanings without apparent limit? In spite of all this knowledge, most of us still agree with Jeremy. Where we find disagreement is on the answer to the spider's question. Artificial life must ask this question: With what do we compare artificial life? The founding characterizations of artificial life comparing " life-as-it-could-be" with "life-as-we-know-