The traditional comparison between biological brains and artificial systems is becoming increasingly difficult to sustain in terms of individual properties. Artificial networks can exhibit recurrence, plasticity, critical or near critical dynamics, metastable behavior, high dimensional population activity, adaptive responses, and large scale connectivity. Whole brain simulations have reached...
This paper reconstructs a conceptual shift from the original theory of autopoiesis to later enactive approaches to cognition and experience. The central claim is that the transition is not a straightforward deduction from autopoiesis. Maturana’s identification of life with cognition expands the concept of cognition from the outset. Later developments add embodied action, autonomy, adaptivity,...
Functionalism is among the most influential positions in the philosophy of mind. Its central idea is that mental states are determined not by their material constitution but by their functional or causal role. This gives rise to the possibility of multiple realization: if the same functional organization can be realized in biological and artificial systems, then, in principle, the same mental...
This essay develops an argument for the principled, not merely practical, impossibility of producing artificial life and artificial consciousness. The impossibility follows from the convergence of several lines of reasoning: from the nature of scientific abstraction, which always yields a map and never the landscape itself; from the size and branching structure of the evolutionary space of...