User:Tancre/readings/machinic life

Introduction

Liminal Machines
After world war II, 2 machines:

• computers (reletaed to war & death)
• liminal machine (associated with life) > behaviour of living entities (homeostasis, self-directes action, adaptability, reproduction).

Neither fully alive nor animated but machinic life mirroring the behavior of organic life. Artificial or parallel alternative to life VS biological realm. From cybernetic to ALife.

• Von Neumann - self-reproducing automata
• Shannon - maze-solving mouse
• Ashby - self-organizing homeostat
• Walter - artificial tortoises
• ALife's digital organisms that spawn and mutate
• Smart software agents
• Autonomous mobile robots

Strong theories > not a simple simulation but a realization of life by instantiating and actualizing its principles in another medium or material substrate. Stedealy expanding substrate interconnected with the human world making a machinic phylum VS separation nature/technology.
But eerie and disturbing abstractness > intrinsically alluring
Not exact imitation of life but complexity of behavior 'equal' to simplest natural organisms.
from cybernetic > complexity VS biological hierarchy

Increasing interest in how the interaction of low-level elements, computational primitives produce complex behavior we associate to living systems.
Von Neumann > a self-reproducing automaton capable of evolution will lead to break the complxity barrier
Ashby > complexity from coupling a simple constructed dynamical system
Walter > simple elements and networks, for multiple purposes
Langton, Ray, Adami...
From the successes of ALife > new AI, embed lessons from ALife for complexity in autonomous machines in the material world. Recently, to emulate the complex circuits of information processing in the brain

In cultural and philosophical analysis, diffuse and seldom questioned anthropomorfism. In practice, question of functionality and meaning, framed in mimetic, representional terms. 'Life' as final arbiter: how well they simulate, help us to understand their singularity. Simulation gauged on their natural organic counterpart in the lifeworld.
No consensus in biology on the term 'life'. Agreement on 2 basics processes involved: metabolism to extract energy from environment / reproduction with a hereditary mechanism that will evolve adaptations for survival. In synthesis of life: hardware(robotics), software(replicating and evolving computer programs), wetware(replicating and evolving artifical protocells).

New kind of entity, sciences positioned between two perspectives (semantic zones): metaphysics of life / history of the technical object. Usually separated but reciprocally codetermine each other (+ use of genetic engineering). Ridefinition and redistributin of 'phusis'(organic, reproduction) and 'techne'(inorganic, replication) in a biotechnical matrix + energence of machinic life.
>> collapses boundaries and double incersion : self-reproducing non-organic machines and biological organisms as autopoietic machines.
Groundbreaking expansion of theoretical terrain, interactions and relations among computation/nonlinear dynamical systems/evolution.
Narratives and contextualizations:

• denial of artificial life or just a world artifact, peripheral tool of theoretical biotlogy, software engineering, or robotics. Unquestioned and conventionalized assumptions about life. > artificial life is not real life, no need for conceptual scaffoldings.

Foucault > 'life itself did not exists' before the end of 18th century, onli living beings. Life only from a unifying concept by becoming invisible as a process, secret force within the body's depths. Notion of life followed by a more precise understanding of death (clinical, anatomical dissection). Before Bichat - Treatise on membranes(1807), life as the sum of the functions that oppose death. Modern narratives about artificial life, Shelley - frankenstein (1819).

Molecular biology (VS vestigial vitalism) > 'life's secret forces invisibly at work', reduction to analysis of genetic programming and machinery of cell reprodution and growth. But reproduction perpetuate life in its unity, does not create it. Only metaphysical level. Dependence on IT or bioinformatics.
Human Genome Project - systematically inscribing 'the human' in the genetic code that defines the anthropos.
Stiegler > jacob's 'the logic of life: a history of heredity' > variance of mental memory VS invariance of genetic memory, genetic code prevents changes (from itself and environment) in its program. Only random mutation can bring change. The program does not learn from experience.
For Jacob (1970), autonomy and inflexibility of DNA code ensure identity VS contingencies of cultural memory. This approach gaved a new orthodocy to molecular biology, but true in theory, not in practice.
New approaches on 'invariance' of the genome and genome as a 'program'. (resonating with ALife):
Caporale > more diversity than flexibility. Genome as a complex adaptive system that can anticipate and respond to change. Certain ares of the genome are 'creative sites of focused mutation' while others are less volatile.
Kauffman > parallel distributed regulatory network VS program consisting of serial algorithms. Langton, computation in nature is accomplished by large numbers of simple processors locally connected, like neurons and immune system. (emerged computation as basis of ALife).

• molecular biology + hisotry of technical objects
• nonstandard theory of computation

To discuss cybernetic/AI/ALife within the same framework. Stiegler - la technique et le temps > history and mode of being of the technical objects. In particular 'dynamic of the technical system', rise of industrialism as a historical background to theorize the machinic self-reproduction/organization in cybernetics and ALife.
Generally, technical system when a technical revolution stabilizes aroound a technology. (Gille,Leroi-Gourhan,Simondon biological concept of evolution can be applied to the technical system. Simondon - Du mode d'existence des objects techniques (1958) > with intustrial revolution, new kind of technical object with a quasi-biological dynamic. 'becoming organic' as a tendency toward a unity and constant adaptation to itself and the changing conditions it brings about. Human, from active subject to operator, part of the large system.
From this perspective, experiments in machinic life less esoteric but a manifestation in science of an tendency of the technical system as a whole. Not as becoming-organic (simondon) but becoming-machinic, because transformation of our conception of the natural world. Our understanding of this becoming-machinic involves changes in our understanding of the nature and scope of computation in relation to dynamical system and evolutionary processses.

The Computational Assemblage
Contemporary technical system based on the computer, and cybernetics, robotics Alife work within it but with a reflection on how it works as a new type of abstract machine (VS a mere tool) that can be actualized in a different number of computational assemblages, material computational mechanism + correlated discourse (not only technical code and instructions but context).
ex. early AI (top-down model, cognition as a program) VS artificial neural net (bottom-up model, from biological brain's network, higly distributed parallel processing)
Computational assemblages give raise to new ways of thinking about the relation between physical processes and conputation (information processing). Ashby, computer in relation to life and complexity of dynamical system > We thought there is some rare and peculiar event to life to occur but actually every dynamic system generate its own form of intelligent life.
1980s new researches to consider computational theory and dynamical systems togheter. Behavior of cellular automaton (CA from von neumann 1940, conway's game of life 1960, wolfram 1983 ), unpredictable and complex behavior from a the simplest rule set. New kind of computer assemblage.
margolus - reversible information-preserving CA/ vichniac - analogies between CA and physical systems / toffoli - alternative in the modelling of physics problem

Narratives of Machinic Life
cellular automata > it is more useful to focus on specific computational assemblage than simply discuss the computer as a new technology that automates and transform what existed before.
Computer lies at the heart of the contemporary technical system