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This chapter examines three limit biologies that theorize what life was—that is, they declare the possible end of “life”: Artificial Life, marine microbiology, and astrobiology. Artificial Life is a genre of theoretical biology that flourished most vigorously in the 1990s and sought to model living things in the medium of computer simulation. Marine microbiology is a field that has as its object of study the world's tiniest, most abundant, and metabolically extreme ocean creatures, including microbes at deep-sea volcanoes. Astrobiology is the study of life as it might exist on other worlds. The chapter argues that the conceptual trouble bedeviling “life” is shadowed by worries about what form “theory” might take in natural and social analysis these days. The emphasis is on how accounts of life forms in biology and ideas about social and cultural forms of life inform and deform one another.

This chapter examines how scientists working on Artificial Life have understood their practices as situated historically. It first considers the practice of finding genealogies for Artificial Life, arguing that such a search for ancestors carries acute historiographical and epistemological dangers. It then comments on computer simulations that fashion the computer as a kind of fish tank into which users can peer to see artificial life forms swimming about. It also discusses a different realm of modeling, that of cognition in Artificial Intelligence. The chapter concludes by suggesting a mode of imagining history that it calls an underwater archaeology of knowledge. In an underwater archaeology of knowledge, representational artifacts become mixed in with portraits of the world, requiring new sorts of narrative disentangling and qualification.

This chapter discusses how current designers of artificial creatures place their creations in a medium in order to make them seem lifelike, and provides a commentary on the practice of finding genealogies for Artificial Life. Floating shows how the effect of empiricity can be sustained through the medium of interpretation itself. Artificial Life has been no stranger to epistemological debates about the relation between the world and the agent that knows it. Like the Museum of Jurassic Technology, an institution that reproduces, repurposes, parodies, and confuses the very notion of a museum by archiving and displaying knowledge and artifacts that may or may not be part of actual human history, Artificial Life simulations may be “a setting of and for confabulation where hermeneutics is suspended.”

This chapter offers a definition of the term “emergent” that is relevant to the study of Artificial Life. Since its inception, the field of Artificial Life has consistently referred to the property of “emergent” phenomena as one of its primary distinguishing features. Despite its frequent use in the literature, however, a clear and widely accepted definition of the term “emergent” is yet to be realized. The chapter studies emergence in the realm of an ALife model, and notes the rich history of the concept, which the ALife approach will hopefully expand. The idea of emergence could perhaps be traced to Heraclitus, with his theory of flux; and Anaxagoras, with his theory of perichoresis, which held that all discernible structures in the world are products of a dynamical unmixing process which began with a homogeneous chaos.

The introduction to Artificial Chemistries discusses its root in Artificial Life research before explaining with a simple example from the mathematical area of Arithmetic what we can imagine under an artificial chemistry. It explains how some fundamental questions of Artificial Life are connected to questions of Artificial Chemistry and shows a few of the general features we’d expect to be exhibited by an AC.