Imitatio Vitae: Artificial Life and Intelligence, 1730-1950

这个项目研究合成生命的起源。这本书的目标是从18世纪初开始尝试模拟生物的行为和身体功能，到20世纪初欧洲文化和经济的饱和，一直到20世纪40年代电子计算的出现。作者将跟随发明者的脚步，把这些早期的模拟看作是实验，一方面测试生命和智能的本质，另一方面测试无生命和无智能的本质，随着它们的发展，改变双方，积极的和惰性的。我们能设计一台会说话、会写字、会下棋、会作曲、会画画、有感觉、会消化食物、会流血、会呼吸、有感觉、会学习的机器吗？早期人工生命的设计者问，如果是这样，这是否意味着生命和思维本质上是机械的？或者更确切地说，像说话和演奏音乐这样的能力对于有生命和智慧的生物来说是不必要的；或者，这种惰性物质和机制隐藏着一种内在的生命能力？这些研究的结果是一种不断变化的认识论和社会分类学，将有生命的从无生命中分类，将有机的从机械中分类，将智能的从机械中分类，在每一个转折点上都投射出生命和智能的新定义。这种不断重新定义的过程绝不是纯粹的哲学兴趣，而是与一系列经济和社会问题及其影响密不可分。根据机器能做什么和不能做什么，某些人类职业变得不那么像人类，而另一些则变得更像人类。例如，当可以用机器编织有图案的织物时，纺织就处于可以机械化和不能机械化的界限的一边。相比之下，这种面料的设计则落在了另一边，因为设计的创造性工作似乎不可能自动化。本书的核心分析将是社会、认识论和经济力量在指导人工生命项目中不可分割的参与。该项目的学术价值有三个方面：首先，讲述了一个关于早期现代科学技术的新故事，一个试图将生活与思想结合起来的传统；第二，为当今的这些当务之急恢复其完整的历史背景；最后，要理解生命和智力的某些特征在这个复杂的历史过程中变得突出，然后逐渐消失，被其他特征所取代，以及不断重新定义生活和思考的意义所带来的哲学和社会后果。就其更广泛的影响而言，这项研究已经产生了两门新课程，并开始建立一个材料档案（文件、照片和视频），用于公开展示和教育学生，特别是那些进入科学和工程领域的学生，关于历史在定义他们的工作以及他们项目的哲学和社会含义方面的作用。

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.