Philosophical Content and Method in Artificial Life

The field of artificial life is enriching both the content and method of philosophy. One example of the impact of artificial life on the content of philosophy is the light it sheds on the perennial philosophical question of the nature of emergent pheonomena in general. Another second example is the way it highlights and promises to explain the suppleness of mental processes. Artificial life's computational thought experiments also provide philosophy with a methodological innovation. The limitations of the central arguments in Stephen Jay Gould's Wonderful Life and Daniel Dennett's Darwin's Dangerous Idea illustrate the value of this

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