Advances in Artificial Life - ReadingSample

Preface Why is the question of the difference between living and non-living matter intellectually so attractive to the man of the West? Where are our dreams about our own ability to understand this difference and to overcome it using the firmly established technologies rooted? Where are, for instance, the cultural roots of the enterprises covered nowadays by the discipline of Artificial Life? Contemplating such questions, one of us has recognized [6] the existence of the eternal dream of the man of the West expressed, for example, in the Old Testament as follows: ... the Lord God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being (Genesis, 2.7). This is the dream about the workmanlike act of the creation of Adam from clay, about the creation of life from something non-living, and the confidence in the magic power of technologies. How has this dream developed and been converted into a reality, and how does it determine our present-day activities in science and technology? What is this confidence rooted in? Then God said: " Let us make man in our image... " (Genesis, 1.26). Man believes in his own ability to repeat the Creator's acts, to change ideas into real things, because he believes he is godlike. This confidence is – using the trendy Dawkins' term – perhaps the most important cultural meme of the West. In Prague there is a myth from the Middle Ages about this dream and confidence. According to it [8,10,11], a famous Prague Rabbi, Judah Loew ben Be-zalel, who lived at the end of the 15th and at the beginning of the 16th century (a real person buried in Prague's Old Town Jewish cemetery), once constructed a creature of human shape – the Prague Golem. The construction of Golem had two main phases. First, the rabbi and his collaborators formed an earthen sculpture of a man-like figure. Second, he found the appropriate text, wrote it down on a slip of paper and put it into Golem's mouth. So long as this seal remained in Golem's mouth, the Golem could work and do his master's bidding, and perform all kinds of chores for him, helping him and the Jews of Prague in many ways. The Golem was alive (if we can call such a state alive). The development of the old idea …