Life and Its Close Relatives

When driven by an external thermodynamic gradient, nonbiological physical systems can exhibit a wide range of behaviours usually associated with living systems. Consequently, Artificial Life researchers should be open to the possibility that there is no hard-and-fast distinction between the biological and the physical. This suggests a novel field of research: the application of biologists' methods for studying organisms to simple "near-life" phenomena in non-equilibrium physical systems. We illustrate this with some examples, including natural dynamic phenomena such as hurricanes and human artefacts such as photocopiers. This has implications for the notion of agency, which we discuss.

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