Genesis Redux: Essays in the History and Philosophy of Artificial Life

by Jessica Riskin (Editor)

Since antiquity, philosophers and engineers have tried to take life’s measure by reproducing it. Aiming to reenact Creation, at least in part, these experimenters have hoped to understand the links between body and spirit, matter and mind, mechanism and consciousness. Genesis Redux examines moments from this centuries-long experimental efforts to simulate life in machinery, to synthesize life out of material parts, and to understand living beings by comparison with inanimate mechanisms.

Jessica Riskin collects seventeen essays from distinguished scholars in several fields. These studies offer an unexpected and far-reaching attempts to create artificial life have rarely been driven by an impulse to reduce life and mind to machinery.  On the contrary, designers of synthetic creatures have generally assumed a role for something nonmechanical. The history of artificial life is thus also a history of theories of soul and intellect.

Taking a historical approach to a modern quandary, Genesis Redux is essential reading for historians and philosophers of science and technology, scientists and engineers working in artificial life and intelligence, and anyone engaged in evaluating these world-changing projects.

Genres: Science, History Of Science, Nonfiction

389 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 2007

Reviews

[Dagezi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oh am I fucking psyched to read this. (revisited 6/5: this is so totally bad ass. Tasty, bite-sized essays interestingly thematized. Sort of blew my undergrads' minds. Mine too to a degree).