Limitations of Scientiic Ontology

Artiicial life is a new multidisciplinary science which is emerging from established practices in artiicial intelligence, computational biology, and cybernetics. It is argued in this paper that conventional scientiic concepts of being and existence, i.e. ontology, which underpin most of our attempts to create artiicial life and intelligent systems, are inadequate to deal with these issues. It is argued that the current, pervasive and popular , positivistic philosophy of science is wholly inadequate when we come to deal with the issue of artiicial life. However, by extending our ontological basis, speciically by incorporating a relativistic ontology (supporting a continuum of existence and being) we argue that the problem concerning the possibility of the creation of artiicial life becomes tractable but not necessarily solvable. We argue that this approach lends itself to the development of usefully adaptive systems which can, in eeect, simulate the intelligent (or cognitive) behaviour which we require of our systems, while not purporting them to be alive. An important ramiication of this argument is the necessity of self-organization for eeecting this development. 1 The context Established endeavours in artiicial intelligence and computational biology, together with the study of autonomous systems, have begun to coalesce and a new multidisciplinary science, artiicial life, is emerging. The ground upon which this new discipline is being built is, perhaps, not what it should be. It is argued in this paper that conventional scientiic concepts of being and existence, which underpin most of our attempts to create artiicial life and intelligent systems, are inadequate to deal with these issues. We take issue with the current philosophy of science which is rooted in common-sense, empirical and materialistic,