We show that although the algebraic semantics of place/transition Petri nets under the collective token philosophy can be fully explained in terms of strictly symmetric monoidal categories, the analogous construction under the individual token philosophy is not completely satisfactory, because it lacks universality and also functoriality. We introduce the notion of pre-net to recover these aspe...

Basing ourselves on the writings of Hans Jonas, we offer to psychosomatic medicine a philosophy of life that surmounts the mind-body dualism which has plagued Western thought since the origins of modern science in seventeenth century Europe. Any present-day account of reality must draw upon everything we know about the living and the non-living. Since we are living beings ourselves, we know wha...

What is the ontological status of Artificial Life systems? This question admits two interpretations. The first asks whether and to what degree Artificial Life systems could potentially be considered ‘alive’ in the sense that we take naturally occuring biological systems to be. The second has to do with what sort of role Artificial Life systems occupy in scientific inquiry. In this paper, we inv...