Claus Emmeche - Böcker

What is life? Is it just the biologically familiar--birds, trees, snails, people--or is it an infinitely complex set of patterns that a computer could simulate? What role does intelligence play in separating the organic from the inorganic, the living from the inert? Does life evolve along a predestined path, or does it suddenly emerge from what appeared lifeless and programmatic? In this easily accessible and wide-ranging survey, Claus Emmeche outlines many of the challenges and controversies involved in the dynamic and curious science of artificial life. Emmeche describes the work being done by an international network of biologists, computer scientists, and physicists who are using computers to study life as it could be, or as it might evolve under conditions different from those on earth. Many artificial-life researchers believe that they can create new life in the computer by simulating the processes observed in traditional, biological life-forms. The flight of a flock of birds, for example, can be reproduced faithfully and in all its complexity by a relatively simple computer program that is designed to generate electronic "boids." Are these "boids" then alive?The central problem, Emmeche notes, lies in defining the salient differences between biological life and computer simulations of its processes. And yet, if we can breathe life into a computer, what might this mean for our other assumptions about what it means to be alive? The Garden in the Machine touches on every aspect of this complex and rapidly developing discipline, including its connections to artificial intelligence, chaos theory, computational theory, and studies of emergence. Drawing on the most current work in the field, this book is a major overview of artificial life. Professionals and nonscientists alike will find it an invaluable guide to concepts and technologies that may forever change our definition of life.

Knowledge production in academia today is burgeoning and increasingly interdisciplinary in nature. Research within the humanities is no exception: it is distributed across a variety of methodic styles of research and increasingly involves interactions with fields outside the narrow confines of the university. As a result, the notion of liberal arts and humanities within Western universities is undergoing profound transformations. In Mapping Frontier Research in the Humanities, the contributors explore this transformative process. What are the implications, both for the modes of research and for the organisation of the humanities and higher education?The volume explores the intra- and extra-academic engagement of humanities researchers, their styles of research, and exemplifies their interdisciplinary character. The humanities are shaping debates about culture and identity, but how? Has neuroscience changed the humanities? What do they tell us about ‘hypes’ and economic ‘bubbles’? What is their international agenda? Drawing on a number of case studies from the humanities, the perceived divide between classical and ‘post-academic’ modes of research can be captured by a republican theory of the humanities. Avoiding simple mechanical metrics, the contributors suggest a heuristic appreciation of different types of impact and styles of research. From this perspective, a more composite picture of research on human culture, language and history emerges. It goes beyond “rational agents”, and situates humanities research in more complex landscapes of collective identities, networks, and constraints that open for new forms of intellectual leadership in the 21st century.

Knowledge production in academia today is burgeoning and increasingly interdisciplinary in nature. Research within the humanities is no exception: it is distributed across a variety of methodic styles of research and increasingly involves interactions with fields outside the narrow confines of the university. As a result, the notion of liberal arts and humanities within Western universities is undergoing profound transformations. In Mapping Frontier Research in the Humanities, the contributors explore this transformative process. What are the implications, both for the modes of research and for the organisation of the humanities and higher education?The volume explores the intra- and extra-academic engagement of humanities researchers, their styles of research, and exemplifies their interdisciplinary character. The humanities are shaping debates about culture and identity, but how? Has neuroscience changed the humanities? What do they tell us about ‘hypes’ and economic ‘bubbles’? What is their international agenda? Drawing on a number of case studies from the humanities, the perceived divide between classical and ‘post-academic’ modes of research can be captured by a republican theory of the humanities. Avoiding simple mechanical metrics, the contributors suggest a heuristic appreciation of different types of impact and styles of research. From this perspective, a more composite picture of research on human culture, language and history emerges. It goes beyond “rational agents”, and situates humanities research in more complex landscapes of collective identities, networks, and constraints that open for new forms of intellectual leadership in the 21st century.

This book presents programmatic texts on biosemiotics, written collectively by world leading scholars in the field (Deacon, Emmeche, Favareau, Hoffmeyer, Kull, Markoš, Pattee, Stjernfelt). In addition, the book includes chapters which focus closely on semiotic case studies (Bruni, Kotov, Maran, Neuman, Turovski).According to the central thesis of biosemiotics, sign processes characterise all living systems and the very nature of life, and their diverse phenomena can be best explained via the dynamics and typology of sign relations. The authors are therefore presenting a deeper view on biological evolution, intentionality of organisms, the role of communication in the living world and the nature of sign systems — all topics which are described in this volume. This has important consequences on the methodology and epistemology of biology and study of life phenomena in general, which the authors aim to help the reader better understand.