Fac of Art

In this article, we would like to discuss some aspects of a theoretical framework for Artificial Life, focusing on the problem of an explicit definition of living systems useful for an effective artificial construction of them. The limits of a descriptive approach will be critically discussed, and a constructive (synthetic) approach will be proposed on the basis of the autopoietic theory of Maturana and Varela.

In this short presentation we wish to formulate a definition of social embodiment grounded on an analysis of the relations between emotions, social interaction and development. Our hope is that this theoretical definition can be "tested" by social robotics, conceived in a "synthetic" (Pfeifer et al., 2008) or "constructivist" (Nehaniv and Dautenhahn 2007) way -in short: building robotic models to comprehend human cognition.

In this article, we would like to discuss some aspects of a theoretical framework for Artificial Life, focusing on the problem of an explicit definition of living systems useful for an effective artificial construction of them. The limits of a descriptive approach will be critically discussed, and a constructive (synthetic) approach will be proposed on the basis of the autopoietic theory of Maturana and Varela.

An approach which has the purpose to catch what characterizes the specificity of a living system, pointing out what makes it different with respect to physical and artificial systems, needs to find a new point of view -new descriptive modalities. In particular it needs to be able to describe not only the single processes which can be observed in an organism, but what integrates them in a unitary system. In order to do so, it is necessary to consider a higher level of description which takes into consideration the relations between these processes, that is the organization rather than the structure of the system. Once on this level of analysis we can focus on an abstract relational order that does not belong to the individual components and does not show itself as a pattern, but is realized and maintained in the continuous flux of processes of transformation of the constituents. Using Tibor Ganti's words we call it "Order in the Nothing". In order to explain this approach we analyse the historical path that generated the distinction between organization and structure and produced its most mature theoretical expression in the autopoietic biology of Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela. We then briefly analyse Robert Rosen's (M,R)-Systems, a formal model conceptually built with the aim to catch the organization of living beings, and which can be considered coherent with the autopoietic theory. In conclusion we will propose some remarks on these relational descriptions, pointing out their limits and their possible developments with respect to the structural thermodynamical description.

This article addresses the issue of defining the universal properties of living systems through an organizational approach, according to which the distinctive properties of life lie in the functional organization which correlates its physicochemical components in living systems, and not in these components taken separately. Drawing on arguments grounded in this approach, this article identifies autonomy, with a set of related organizational properties, as universal properties of life, and includes cognition within this set.

In this paper we argue that molecular evolution, and the evolution of prebiotic and early biological systems are qualitatively different processes, in which a crucial role is played respectively by structural stability and by dynamical mechanisms of regulation and integration. These different features entail also distinct modalities of interaction between system and environment that need to be taken into consideration when discussing  molecular and biological evolution and selection.

In this article we provide an epistemological analysis of three uses of the concept of contingency in biology. On the basis of this analysis we propose a heuristic solution to the issue of contingency versus determinism in the domain of studies on the origin of life, which makes it possible to approach this problem from a scientific point of view rather than by recurring to belief.