creators_name: Harnad, Stevan type: journalp datestamp: 2001-06-18 lastmod: 2011-03-11 08:54:41 metadata_visibility: show title: Levels of Functional Equivalence in Reverse Bioengineering: The Darwinian Turing Test for Artificial Life ispublished: pub subjects: bio-evo subjects: comp-sci-art-intel subjects: comp-sci-robot full_text_status: public keywords: Computationalism, evolution, functionalism, reverse engineering, robotics, symbol grounding, synthetic life, virtual life, Turing test. abstract: Both Artificial Life and Artificial Mind are branches of what Dennett has called "reverse engineering": Ordinary engineering attempts to build systems to meet certain functional specifications, reverse bioengineering attempts to understand how systems that have already been built by the Blind Watchmaker work. Computational modelling (virtual life) can capture the formal principles of life, perhaps predict and explain it completely, but it can no more be alive than a virtual forest fire can be hot. In itself, a computational model is just an ungrounded symbol system; no matter how closely it matches the properties of what is being modelled, it matches them only formally, with the mediation of an interpretation. Synthetic life is not open to this objection, but it is still an open question how close a functional equivalence is needed in order to capture life. Close enough to fool the Blind Watchmaker is probably close enough, but would that require molecular indistinguishability, and if so, do we really need to go that far? date: 1994 date_type: published publication: Artificial Life volume: 1 number: 3 pagerange: 293-301 refereed: TRUE referencetext: Boolos, G. S. & R. C. Jeffrey (1980) Computability and Logic. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press). Dennett, D.C. (in press) Cognitive Science as Reverse Engineering: Several Meanings of "Top Down" and "Bottom Up." In: Prawitz, D., Skyrms, B. & Westerstahl, D. (Eds.) Proceedings of the 9th International Congress of Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science. North Holland. Harnad, S. (1982a) Neoconstructivism: A unifying theme for the cognitive sciences. In: Language, Mind and Brain. (T. Simon & R. Scholes, eds., Hillsdale NJ: Erlbaum), 1 - 11. Harnad, S. (1982b) Consciousness: An afterthought. Cognition and Brain Theory 5: 29 - 47. Harnad, S. (ed.) (1987) Categorical Perception: The Groundwork of Cognition. New York: Cambridge University Press. Harnad, S. (1989) Minds, Machines and Searle. Journal of Theoretical and Experimental Artificial Intelligence 1: 5-25. Harnad, S. (1990a) The Symbol Grounding Problem. Physica D 42: 335-346. Harnad, S. (1990b) Against Computational Hermeneutics. (Invited commentary on Eric Dietrich's Computationalism) Social Epistemology 4: 167-172. Harnad, S. (1990c) Lost in the hermeneutic hall of mirrors. Invited Commentary on: Michael Dyer: Minds, Machines, Searle and Harnad. Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Artificial Intelligence 2: 321 - 327. Harnad, S. (1991) Other bodies, Other minds: A machine incarnation of an old philosophical problem. Minds and Machines 1: 43-54. Harnad, S. (1992a) Connecting Object to Symbol in Modeling Cognition. In: A. Clarke and R. Lutz (Eds) Connectionism in Context. Springer Verlag. Harnad, S. (1992b) The Turing Test Is Not A Trick: Turing Indistinguishability Is A Scientific Criterion. SIGART Bulletin 3(4) (October) 9 - 10. Harnad, S. (1993a) Artificial Life: Synthetic Versus Virtual. Artificial Life III. Proceedings, Santa Fe Institute Studies in the Sciences of Complexity. Volume XVI. Harnad, S. (1993b) Grounding Symbols in the Analog World with Neural Nets. Think 2(1) 12 - 78 (Special issue on "Connectionism versus Symbolism," D.M.W. Powers & P.A. Flach, eds.). Harnad, S. (1993c) Turing Indistinguishability and the Blind Watchmaker. Presented at Conference on "Evolution and the Human Sciences" London School of Economics Centre for the Philosophy of the Natural and Social Sciences 24 - 26 June 1993. Harnad S. (1993d) Discussion (passim) In: Bock, G. & Marsh, J. (Eds.) Experimental and Theoretical Studies of Consciousness. CIBA Foundation Symposium 174. Chichester: Wiley Harnad, S. (1993e) Grounding Symbolic Capacity in Robotic Capacity. In: Steels, L. and R. Brooks (eds.) The "Artificial Life" Route to "Artificial Intelligence": Building Situated Embodied Agents. New Haven: Lawrence Erlbaum Harnad, S, (1994) Does the Mind Piggy-Back on Robotic and Symbolic Capacity? To appear in: H. Morowitz (ed.) The Mind, the Brain, and Complex Adaptive Systems. Harnad, S., Hanson, S.J. & Lubin, J. (1991) Categorical Perception and the Evolution of Supervised Learning in Neural Nets. In: Working Papers of the AAAI Spring Symposium on Machine Learning of Natural Language and Ontology (DW Powers & L Reeker, Eds.) pp. 65-74. Presented at Symposium on Symbol Grounding: Problems and Practice, Stanford University, March 1991. Harnad, S. Hanson, S.J. & Lubin, J. (1994) Learned Categorical Perception in Neural Nets: Implications for Symbol Grounding. In: V. Honavar & L. Uhr (eds) Symbol Processing and Connectionist Network Models in Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Modelling: Steps Toward Principled Integration. (in press) Hayes, P., Harnad, S., Perlis, D. & Block, N. (1992) Virtual Symposium on Virtual Mind. Minds and Machines 2: 217-238. Nagel, T. (1974) What is it like to be a bat? Philosophical Review 83: 435 - 451. Morowitz, H. (1992) Beginning of Cellular Life. Yale University Press. Nagel, T. (1986) The View From Nowhere. New York: Oxford University Press. Searle, J. R. (1980) Minds, brains and programs. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 3: 417-424. Turing, A. M. (1964) Computing machinery and intelligence. In: Minds and machines. A. Anderson (ed.), Engelwood Cliffs NJ: Prentice Hall. citation: Harnad, Stevan (1994) Levels of Functional Equivalence in Reverse Bioengineering: The Darwinian Turing Test for Artificial Life. [Journal (Paginated)] document_url: http://cogprints.org/1591/1/harnad94.artlife2.html