Un Q 1 The Localization Hypothesis

! -not inal vrsion The field of artificial life is very diverse, with contributions ranging from systems biology to theoretical research into the origin of life to robotics. Yet although artificial life research predominantly uses methodologies from computer science and mathematics, there is also a strong philosophical component in the artificial life research agenda. This philosophical aspect of the field has been very much connected to the attempt to create living systems in silico. Such an attempt leads to a fundamental question: Given a specific computational system, how do we decide whether or not it is alive? Or alternatively, how do we distinguish between systems that behave like living systems (‘‘lifelike systems’’) and systems that are truly alive? As it turned out, this question is not an easy one to answer. Despite many attempts, nobody has yet been able to identify a single set of criteria to demarcate living systems from nonliving systems. The attempt to create life in silico has so far not been a great success. No examples of computational systems that would, at least at an intuitive level, satisfy even a significant minority of researchers as an example of life have been found. This might be taken as an indication that there is something about life that cannot be captured in computational models. Hence there are two big questions that drive the philosophical quest of artificial life.