'But this is experimental philosophy!'

— Narziss Ach

Artificial Life
as Experimental
Philosophy

A special session at ALIFE 2026
– · Waterloo, Canada

At a Glance

Session
Artificial Life as Experimental Philosophy
Conference
ALIFE 2026
Event dates
to
Location
Waterloo, Canada
Paper deadline
Submit paper
ALIFE Submission Portal
Contact
[email protected]

ALife has always had a markedly philosophical character — a fact not unnoticed by some philosophers. Daniel Dennett, for instance, saw in ALife the creation of testable thought experiments — in simulating a thing, you render explicit your assumptions. Despite this clear affinity, however, the engagement he foresaw has not materialised.

This is not for ALife's lack of interest in or relevance to traditionally philosophical content, but perhaps rather for its practicing an alternate philosophy in which the reflexive relationship between pragmatic and theoretical is constitutive. Here philosophy and science are united, with thought in turn structuring and being structured by experimental practice. In this respect, ALife may be closer to the original tradition of natural philosophy than philosophy in its more modern disciplinary forms.

"We will talk only about machines with very simple internal structures, too simple in fact to be interesting from the point of view of mechanical or electrical engineering. Interest arises, rather, when we look at these machines or vehicles as if they were animals in a natural environment. We will be tempted, then, to use psychological language in describing their behavior. And yet we know very well that there is nothing in these vehicles that we have not put in ourselves. This will be an interesting educational game."

— Valentino Braitenberg, Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology

This session invites broad reflection on the nature of this relationship between philosophy and artificial life. What role do computational experiments play in philosophical inquiry — and what role should they? How does ALife address questions that philosophy also claims — agency, autonomy, emergence, individuality — and how does its treatment differ? The conference theme itself poses one such question: what is life, and what does it mean to be life-like?

Call for Papers

We welcome both experimental work whose philosophical motivations or implications are brought to the fore, and philosophical or theoretical work that engages directly with ALife methods and results. We are as interested in what can be said in principle as in what your work specifically reveals — and especially in work that does not sit neatly in either of these.

Questions of Interest

Questions we are interested in include:

  • What are we doing when we simulate a thing?
  • Where is emergence when it happens in a machine — how do silicon and simulations reshape the question of emergence?
  • What is the relationship in simulations between form, function, parameters, and dynamics?
  • If the rules are made up, what do they teach us — how do we reconcile tunability with the language of findings?
  • What are the laws of motion of living matter, and how does ALife relate to theoretical biology?
  • Is life just physics, or is there something more — what can ALife tell us about the relationship between vitalism and mechanism?
  • What is ALife's precedent, what does it inherit, and how does it differ — from the automata of Hero to the gavra of Rava to Jābir's takwīn?
  • Could artificial life ever really be alive — and if so, what are the implications?
  • How does wet ALife relate to these questions—does it change what counts as artificial, as alive, or both?

These are examples, not boundaries — we welcome any work that engages with the philosophical dimensions of artificial life. Contributions from across ALife, philosophy, history and philosophy of science, and related fields are encouraged.

Submissions

Papers should be 3–8 pages in ALIFE format. We welcome experimental, theoretical, and position papers. Accepted papers will be published in the ALIFE 2026 proceedings (MIT Press). The conference is hybrid — presentations can be given in person or online. Please select the "Artificial Life as Experimental Philosophy" special session when submitting. For full formatting guidelines, see the ALIFE 2026 Call for Papers.

ALIFE 2026 CFP Details Submit via Linklings

Important Dates

Paper submission
Notification
Camera-ready

FAQ

What is this session about?

It explores artificial life as a form of experimental philosophy and asks what computational experiments can contribute to philosophical inquiry.

What kind of work fits this session?

We welcome experimental, theoretical, and position papers. We are as interested in what can be said in principle as in what your work specifically reveals — and especially in work that does not sit neatly in either of these.

When is the submission deadline?

The submission deadline is .

Where can I learn more?

Philosophy & Foundations

  • Pattee, H. H. (1989). "Simulations, Realizations, and Theories of Life." In Artificial Life (SFI Studies in the Sciences of Complexity). — Foundational distinction between simulation and realization in ALife.
  • Pattee, H. H. (1995). "Artificial Life Needs a Real Epistemology." In Advances in Artificial Life (ECAL). — ALife must confront measurement, observation, and the epistemic status of its models.
  • Dennett, D. C. (1994). "Artificial Life as Philosophy." Artificial Life, 1(3). — ALife as "prosthetic imagination." Direct precedent for this session.
  • Bedau, M. A. (2000). "Open Problems in Artificial Life." Artificial Life, 6(4). — Landmark enumeration of unsolved problems, many still philosophical.
  • Braitenberg, V. (1984). Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology. MIT Press. — The ur-text for synthetic psychology. The vehicles on this page are drawn from it.
  • Langton, C. G. (1989). "Artificial Life." In Artificial Life (SFI Studies in the Sciences of Complexity). — Founding statement. "Life as it could be" vs. "life as we know it."
  • Aguilar, W. et al. (2014). "The Past, Present, and Future of Artificial Life." Frontiers in Robotics and AI. — Survey with philosophical context. Open access.

Experimental Work with Philosophical Stakes

  • Beer, R. D. (2020). "An Investigation into the Origin of Autopoiesis." Artificial Life, 26(1). — Computational investigation bearing on philosophy of biology: how can autopoietic organisation emerge from low-level dynamics?
  • Agüera y Arcas, B. et al. (2024). "Computational Life: How Well-formed, Self-replicating Programs Emerge from Simple Interaction." — Bearing on philosophy of biology and metaphysics of life: self-replicators arise spontaneously across computational substrates, but not all — revealing substrate-dependent conditions for the emergence of life.
  • Tiwary, K. et al. (2025). "What if eye...? Computationally Recreating Vision Evolution." Science Advances, 11(51). — Bearing on philosophy of mind and evolutionary epistemology: embodied agents as hypothesis-testing machines, using computational counterfactuals to probe why vision evolved as it did.

Organisers

Ben Gaskin

University of Sydney

PhD candidate working on minimal cognition and the evolution of mind. Driven by the Spinozan conviction that the mind, as something which has come into being, must be understood through the processes that produce it — whether evolution or engineering. Currently serves as representative on the ISAL board for the Emerging Researchers in Artificial Life.

Simon McGregor

University of Sussex

Complex adaptive systems scientist whose research focuses on broad-level principles of cognition both in silico and in vivo, with interests in challenging intuitive assumptions about animacy and agency, information-theoretic frameworks, and the philosophical implications of the Free Energy Principle. He has organised several workshops at the intersection of philosophy and artificial life.