Imitatio Vitae: Artificial Life and Intelligence, 1730-1950

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This project examines the genesis of synthetic life. Its aim is to produce a book about attempts to simulate the behaviors and bodily functions of living creatures from the emergence of such attempts in the early 18th century through their saturation of European culture and economy at the turn of the 20th, and up until the emergence of electronic computing in the 1940s. The author will follow the lead of the inventors and consider these early simulations as experiments testing the essence of life and intelligence on the one hand, and of the inanimate and unintelligent on the other, transforming both sides, the active and the inert, as they progressed. Could one design a machine that could talk, write, play chess, make music, draw pictures, sense, digest food, bleed, breathe, have feelings, and learn? If so, asked early designers of artificial life, would it imply that life and mind were essentially mechanical; or rather that such capacities as talking and making music were inessential to living and intelligent beings; or yet that inert matter and mechanism hid an intrinsic capacity for life? The result of these investigations was an ever-changing epistemological and social taxonomy, sorting the animate from the inanimate, the organic from the mechanical, the intelligent from the rote, projecting, at each turn, new definitions of life and intelligence. This continual process of redefinition was by no means of purely philosophical interest, but was inextricably tied to a set of economic and social problems and implications. Certain human occupations came to seem less human, and others more human, according to what machines could and could not do. For example, when it became possible to weave patterned fabrics by machine, weaving fell on one side of the border between what could be mechanized and what could not. In contrast, the design of such fabrics landed on the other side since it seemed impossible to automate the creative work of design. Central to the book's analysis will be the inextricable engagement of social, epistemological and economic forces in directing projects in artificial life. The intellectual merit of the project is three-fold: first, to tell a new story about early modern science and technology, of a tradition of attempts to synthesize life and mind; second, to restore to these preoccupations of the current day the fullness of their historical backgrounds; and finally to understand the complex historical process by which certain features of life and intelligence have come to seem salient, then faded into obscurity and been replaced by others, and of the consequences, both philosophical and social, of this continual redefinition of what it means to live and to think. As to its broader impact, this research has already generated two new courses and the beginnings of an archive of materials (documents, photographs, and videos) for public presentation and for teaching students, especially those entering science and engineering fields, about the role of history in defining their work and the philosophical and social implications of their projects.