Topic Description

There are two kinds of evolving, developing, and functionally organized entities in our world: biological organisms and technical artifacts. At a somewhat higher level, the parallel goes on with ecosystems and socio-technical systems. It is not astonishing, then, to find in the history of philosophy, but also in biology and in technology, many attempts to use entities of one kind as a model or explanation of the other. The transfer goes in both directions – cf. the machine metaphor for biological organisms and the evolutionary account of technological development. More than such controversial transfers, the comparison of organisms and technical artifacts with respect to special problems turned out to be fruitful in gaining a better understanding of organisms and artifacts. For example, teleological (teleonomic) behavior was described as a matter of self-regulation for both domains; symbolic processes were analyzed for both kinds of entities at the very beginning of thinking about artificial intelligence. More recently, advantage could be taken from such a comparison with respect to concepts of biological and technological functionality. During the last years the topic is vividly discussed in literature.

Participants

• Paul Davies
• Randall Dipert
• Maarten Franssen
• Pawel Garbacz
• Wybo Houkes
• Yoshinobu Kitamura
• Peter Kroes
• Ulrich Krohs
• Tim Lewens
• Andrew Light
• Françoise Longy
• Peter McLaughlin
• Riichiro Mizoguchi
• Mark Perlman
• Beth Preston
• Giacomo Romano
• Marzia Soavi
• Pieter Vermaas