1 .See, for instance, Nick Bostrom, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); Max Tegmark, Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (London: Allen Lane, 2017); Ray Kurzweil, The Age of Spiritual Machines (New York, NY: Viking, 1999); Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near (New York, NY: Viking, 2005).
2 .Irving John Good, Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine, based on talks given at a Conference on the Conceptual Aspects of Biocommunications, Neuropsychiatric Institute, University of California, Los Angeles, October 1962; and in the Artificial Intelligence Sessions of the Winter General Meetings of the IEEE, January 1963 [1, 46]. The first draft of this monograph was completed in April 1963, and the present slightly amended version in May 1964. Available in Advances in Computers (Vol. 6, 1966), pp. 31–88.
3 .Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig, Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2009), p. 27.
4 .The IEEE is a global organisation with over 400,000 members. See the introduction of Ethically Aligned Design: A Vision for Prioritising Human Well-Being with Intelligent and Autonomous Systems, published in 2019.
5 .Richard Dawkin’s book, The Selfish Gene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), epitomises the genetic determinism that dominates popular scientific thought. But the theoretical model that privileges genes over other biological structures is crumbling. Two books by Denis Noble, The Music of Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006) and Dance to the Tune of Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), summarise conclusions drawn from decades of scientific studies. Neesa Carey’s books The Epigenetics Revolution (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2012) and Junk DNA (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2015) emphasise the growing importance of non-genetic factors in medical science.
6 .Biology is surprisingly quiet about how life originated. Nick Lane’s The Vital Question: Energy, Evolution and the Origins of Life (London: Profile Books, 2015) is a convincing account that explains the complex relationship between life and the physical laws that seem to forbid it.
7 .Systems biology is an offshoot of systems theory, a field substantially founded by Ludwig von Bertalanffy in the mid-20th century.
8 .Russell and Norvig, Artificial Intelligence, p. 59.
9 .Ibid., p. 4.
10 .See, for instance, Michael Bratman, ‘Planning and the Stability of Intention’, Minds and Machines (Vol. 2, No. 1, 1992), pp. 1–16.
11 .Amalgamated from definitions offered by Stuart Kaufmann in Investigations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) and ‘Beyond Reductionism: No Laws Entail Biosphere Evolution Beyond Efficient Cause Laws’, Zygon (Vol. 42, No. 4, December 2007), pp. 903–14.
12 .James Lovelock, Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979) is the classic work on the interpendence of life and the biosphere. Recent work by Maël Montévil and Giuseppe Longo offer mathematical accounts of life’s innate capacity for innovation. See Perspectives on Organisms: Biological Time, Symmetries and Singularities (Heidelberg and New York, NY: Springer, 2014); ‘From Physics to Biology by Extending Criticality and Symmetry Breakings’, Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology (Vol. 106, No. 2, 2011), pp. 340–47.
13 .Vera Vasas and Lars Chittka, ‘Insect-Inspired Sequential Inspection Strategy Enables an Artificial Network of Four Neurons to Estimate Numerosity’, iScience (Vol. 11, January 2019), pp. 85–92.
14 .Masashi Aono et al., ‘Remarkable Problem-Solving Ability of Unicellular Amoeboid Organism and its Mechanism’, Royal Society Open Science (Vol. 5, No. 12, 19 December 2018).
15 .In his classic text, Cognition in the Wild (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), Edward Hutchins argues that socio-technical systems such as naval navigation externalise thought into objective processes. Later studies of industry and transportation use the paradigm of embodied cognition to reveal fault lines in collective decision-making and industrial management.
16 .Christian Scheier, Rolf Pfeifer and Yasuo Kunyioshi, ‘Embedded Neural Networks: Exploiting Constraints’, Neural Networks (Vol. 11, No. 7-8, 1998), pp. 1551–69.
17 .James Lovelock was the first person to assert this view in Gaia, and it is now well-accepted that life actively manages the Earth’s temperature, gases, water and other resources vital to its own survival.
18 .In Ethically Aligned Design: A Vision for Prioritising Human Well-Being with Intelligent and Autonomous Systems (p. 12), the IEEE defines its programme as follows: ‘the P7000 Series addresses specific issues at the intersection of technological and ethical considerations’.
19 .For instance, the IEEE’s National Electrical Safety Code which promotes best practices for the construction, operation and repair of power and telecommunications systems.
20 .For a full bibliography, see < http://pantar.com/AI>.
21 .Raymond Noble and Denis Noble, ‘Harnessing Stochasticity: How Do Organisms Make Choices?’, Chaos (Vol. 28, No. 10, October 2018).
22 .Anthony Kenny, The Metaphysics of Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 32– 40.
23 .Keith Farnsworth, ‘How Organisms Gained Causal Independence and How It Might Be Quantified’, Biology (Vol. 7, No. 3, Article 38, June 2018).
24 .Hans Liljenstrom, ‘Intentionality as a Driving Force’, Journal of Consciousness Studies (Vol. 25, No. 1–2, 2018), pp. 206–29.
25 .A purely stochastic system might be defined as one in which all states are equally possible. Thus, all the possible combinations of two unbiased dice would occur by chance equally frequently. However, variations in biological systems are constrained and utilised to generate particular outcomes that are not as equally probable as all other possible outcomes. It is this that gives the system the potential to be creative. The system uses chance, but the outcome is not pure chance. It is goal-directed. This is what we mean by agency.
26 .Raymond Noble and Denis Noble, ‘Was the Watchmaker Blind? Or Was She One-Eyed?, Biology (Vol. 6, No. 4, Article 47, December 2017).
27 .Valerie Odegard and David Schatz, ‘Targeting of Somatic Hypermutation’, Nature Reviews Immunology (Vol. 6, No. 8, August 2006), pp. 573–83.
28 .Denis Noble, ‘Evolution Viewed From Physics, Physiology and Medicine’, Interface Focus (Vol. 7, No. 5, October 2017).
29 .Bertil Hille, Ionic Channels of Excitable Membranes (Sunderland, MA: Sinauer Associates Inc., 1992); Benedict Burns, The Uncertain Nervous System (London: Arnold, 1968); Martin Heisenberg, ‘Is Free Will an Illusion?’, Nature (Vol. 459, May 2009), pp. 164–65; Aubin Tchaptchet, Wuyin Jin and Hans Braun, ‘Diversity and Noise in Neurodynamics Across Different Functional Levels’, in Rubin Wang and Xiaochuan Pan (eds), Advances in Cognitive Neurodynamics (Singapore: Springer, 2015), p. 681–87; Bjorn Brembs and Martin Heisenberg, ‘Der Zufall als kreatives Element in Gehirn und Verhalten’, in U Herkenrath (ed.), Zufall in der belebten Natur (Hennef: Verlag Roman Kovar, 2018), pp. 80–94; Hans Braun, ‘Der Zufall in der Neurobiologie - von Ionenkanälen zur Frage des freien Willens’, Zufall in der belebten Natur (Hennef: Verlag Roman Kovar, 2018), pp. 109–37.
30 .Laurie Santos and Alexandra Rosati, ‘The Evolutionary Roots of Human Decision Making’, Annual Review of Psychology (Vol. 66, 2015), pp. 321–47.
31 .Donald MacKay, ‘On the Logical Indeterminacy of a Free Choice’, Mind (Vol. 69, No. 273, 1960), pp. 31–40.
32 .Kai Arulkumaran et al., ‘Deep Reinforcement Learning: A Brief Survey’, IEEE Signal Processing Magazine (Vol. 34, 2017), pp. 26–38.
33 .In brief, an agent is a system doing something by itself according to its own goals or norms within a specific environment. See Xabier Barandiaran, Ezequiel Di Paolo and Marieke Rohde, ‘Defining Agency: Individuality, Normativity, Asymmetry and Spatio-temporality in Action’, Adaptive Behavior (Vol. 17, No. 5, 2009) pp. 367–86.
34 .Lenny Moss, What Genes Can’t Do (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003); Daniel Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (London: Penguin, 1995).
35 .Teleology is defined as the explanation of phenomena in terms of the purpose they serve rather than of the cause by which they arise. Namely, organisms exhibit goal-directed behaviours, for example to maintain themselves alive. Biologists describe organs by their purpose (the heart to pump blood; the intestine to absorb nutrients).
36 .The philosophical thesis that conceives living organisms as machines that can be completely explained in terms of the structure and interactions of their component parts. See Daniel Nicholson, ‘The Concept of Mechanism in Biology’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C (Vol. 43, No. 1, 2012), pp. 152–63.
37 .Ana M Soto and Carlos Sonnenschein, ‘Reductionism, Organicism, and Causality in the Biomedical Sciences: A Critique’, Perspectives in Biology and Medicine (Vol. 61, No. 4, 2018), pp. 489–502.
38 .Giuseppe Longo et al., ‘Is Information a Proper Observable for Biological Organization?’, Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology (Vol. 109, No. 3, August 2012), pp. 108–14.
39 .Alvaro Moreno, ‘On Minimal Autonomous Agency: Natural and Artificial, Complex Systems (Vol. 27, No. 3, 2018), pp. 289–313; Denis Walsh, Organisms, Agency and Evolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).
40 .Self-organising systems like flames are ‘a-historical’ because they appear spontaneously and can be analysed independently. In contrast, organisms are not spontaneous but historical. This means that they are a consequence of the reproductive activity of a pre-existing organism. Organisms are historical in two contexts, ontogeny, meaning their history as individuals since conception to death, and phylogeny, which is the history of a taxonomic group (for example, a species) throughout evolution.
41 .Giuseppe Longo and Ana M Soto, ‘Why Do We Need Theories?’, Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology (Vol. 122, No. 1, October 2016), pp. 4–10.
42 .Andrea Gambarotto, ‘Vital Forces and Organization: Philosophy of Nature and Biology in Karl Friedrich Kielmeyer’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science (Vol. 38, Part A, 2014), pp. 12–20; Timothy Lenoir, The Strategy of Life: Teleology and Mechanics in Nineteenth-Century Biology (Dordrecht: D Reidel Publishing, 1982).
43 .Organicism has its philosophical bases in Aristotle’s and Kant’s conceptions of the organism. Organicism is a materialistic philosophical stance contrary to reductionism. It asserts that properties that could not have been predicted from the analysis of the lower levels appear at each level of biological organisation. Therefore, explanations should address biological phenomena at all pertinent levels of organisation. Also, implicit in this view is the idea that organisms are not just ‘things’ but objects in relentless change. Central to organicism are four concepts, namely, organisation, historicity, organisms as normative agents, and biological specificity (organisms are individuals). Closely related to organisation is the notion of ‘organisational closure’, which is a ‘distinct level of causation, operating in addition to physical laws, generated by the action of material structures acting as constraints’. See Matteo Mossio and Alvaro Moreno, ‘Organisational Closure in Biological Organisms’, History and Philosophy of Life Sciences (Vol. 32, No. 2, 2010) pp. 269–88. Finally, while objects in physics are generic and thus interchangeable, like rocks and planets, biological objects are specific – that is, they are individuals that are permanently undergoing individuation. See Ana Soto and Carlos Sonnenschein, ‘Emergentism by Default: A View from the Bench’, Synthese (Vol. 151, No. 3, August 2006), pp. 361–76.
44 .Timothy Lenoir, The Strategy of Life: Teleology and Mechanics in Nineteenth-Century Biology (Dordrecht: D Reidel Publishing, 1982).
45 .Homeostasis is the tendency of organisms to maintain a stable, relatively constant internal environment.
46 .A dissipative system is a thermodynamically open system which is operating out of, and often far from, thermodynamic equilibrium in an environment with which it exchanges energy and matter.
47 .Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living (Dordrecht: Reidel Publishing, 1980); Gregoire Nicolis and Ilya Prigogine, Self-Organization in Non-Equilibrium Systems (New York, NY: Wiley, 1977); Stuart Kauffman, The Origins of Order (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991).
48 .Maël Montevil and Matteo Mossio, ‘Biological Organisation as Closure of Constraints’, Journal of Theoretical Biology (Vol. 372, 2015), pp. 179–91.
49 .Alvaro Moreno and Matteo Mossio, Biological Autonomy: A Philosophical and Theoretical Inquiry (New York, NY: Springer, 2015); Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living (Dordrecht: Reidel Publishing, 1980).
50 .Giuseppe Longo et al., ‘In Search of Principles for a Theory of Organisms’, Journal of Biosciences (Vol. 40, No. 5, December 2015), pp. 955–68; Alan Cottrell, ‘The Natural Philosophy of Engines’, Contemporary Physics (Vol. 20, No. 1, 2006), pp. 1–10; Gregoire Nicolis and Ilya Prigogine, Self-Organization in Non-Equilibrium Systems (New York, NY: Wiley, 1977).
51 .Steven Jay Gould, Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History (New York, NY: WW Norton and Company, 1990).
52 .Ibid.
53 .Giuseppe Longo, Maël Montevil and Stuart Kauffman, ‘No Entailing Law, but Enablement in the Evolution of the Biosphere’, paper presented to Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 7 July 2012.
54 .Giuseppe Longo et al., ‘Is Information a Proper Observable for Biological Organization?’, Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology (Vol. 109, No. 3, August 2012), pp. 108–14.
55 .Giuseppe Longo and Ana Soto, ‘Why Do We Need Theories?’, Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology (Vol. 122, No. 1, October 2016), pp. 4–10.
56 .This way of thinking was already implicit in the 18th and 19th centuries. For example, the biologist Xavier Bichat noticed that physical objects, such as rocks or planets, do not get ill. See Georges Canguilhelm, Knowledge of Life (New York, NY: Fordham Press, 2008). According to Canguilhem, ‘life is not indifferent to the conditions in which it is possible, that life is polarity and thereby even an unconscious position of value; in short, life is in fact a normative activity’. And, ‘we do ask ourselves how normativity essential to human consciousness would be explained if it did not in some way exist in embryo in life’. Furthermore, ‘therapeutic need is a vital need, which, even in lower living organisms (with respect to vertebrate structure) arouses reactions of hedonic value or self-healing or self-restoring behaviors. The dynamic polarity of life and the normativity it expresses account for an epistemological fact of whose important significance Bichat was fully aware. While biological pathology exists, there is no physical or chemical or mechanical pathology’. See Georges Canguilhelm, The Normal and The Pathological (New York, NY: Zone Books, 1991).
57 .For example, the lung enables the organism to exchange gases by sending carbon dioxide to the external environment and taking in oxygen. The heart pumps blood, transporting oxygen and nutrients to all cells of the organism. According to an organicist perspective, this interdependence is due to a causal regime technically referred to as the closure of constraints.
58 .Both types of cells, those of prokaryotes like bacteria and of eukaryotes from slime mould to humans.
59 .Longo et al., ‘In Search of Principles for a Theory of Organisms’; Ana M Soto et al., ‘Towards a Theory of Organisms: Three Founding Principles in Search of a Useful Integration’, Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology (Vol. 122, No. 1, October 2016), pp. 77–82.