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Creation: Life and How to Make It

By Steve Grand
2000, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard university Press
Paper 218 pp. Illus b/w
ISBN 0-674-00654-2

Reviewed by Robert Pepperell

pepperell@ntlworld.com

Steve Grand is a popular science writer in the best tradition of the genre. He is motivated by the need to explain, to popularize, an intellectual vision in which he passionately believes, a vision driven by his sustained investigation into some deeply perplexing scientific questions: What is life? Can living processes be replicated? What is consciousness and can it too be replicated? Anyone who has seen or heard him speak will know this passion is fuelled by his conviction that some of the greatest enigmas in human thought (the nature of life and consciousness) are not only explicable but susceptible to synthetic regeneration, given the appropriate tools and methods. Hence the claim made in the book’s subtitle would be, for Grand, a reasonable summary of his project rather than, as it would be for others, a ridiculously bombastic declaration.

Grand’s approach is essentially synthetic rather than analytic. He takes contemporary ideas in physics, mathematics, biology, computer science and neurology and synthesizes a coherent, transdisciplinary model that has the benefit of being more that purely theoretical. His previous experience as the inventor of the artificial life computer game Creatures, and his more recent work constructing ‘artificial beings’, give him a practical insight into the problems of generating complex behaviour with computer code.

To summarise his position, he advocates a theory of emergence, which is to say the properties of natural phenomena such as intelligence and life emerge from the interaction of a multitude of variables without being reducible to any one of them. Nor can any one variable be said to be the first or final cause of any particular event. Even the notion of control we associate with, for example, human agency is seen as the effect of some prior cause or causes rather than as a determining influence itself. Higher order phenomena such as consciousness are less the attributes of a particular substance than consequences of the behaviour of a certain pattern or arrangement: "Consciousness cannot therefore be a property of matter, only a property of certain configurations of matter." (p. 38). It is these principles that Grand seeks to implement through computer simulations, thereby creating virtual laboratories for exploring the creation of life, intelligence and consciousness.

The nub of Grand’s formula for the creation of life is to combine a number of mechanical building blocks such as modulators, transducers, differentiators and integrators (what he calls "God’s LEGO set"), each relatively simple but capable of producing complex behaviour when acting in concert. Crucial to the whole enterprise is the provision of some basic impulses and drives, like the need to eat, communicate, learn and mate, without which, he argues, a living thing would lack purpose. All these behaviours can be simulated in a virtual world-space wherein the life, or computer code behaving as life, is born: "Our task is not to program in intelligent behaviour, but to enable such behaviour to emerge from simulated objects that embody the cybernetic properties from which life emerged in the natural world." (p. 147).

Grand has an engaging style, his arguments are almost always persuasive, and his examples and analogies genuinely illuminating. Given the complexity of the subject matter, the text moves at a lively pace yet without compromising the seriousness of his thesis. I have to admit that in my case he was preaching to the converted, but I hope this book will have a wider impact, in particular on those in the AI and A-Life communities, and indeed in the scientific community in general, who seek to reductively analyse complex phenomena. Although the book might be criticised for sometimes conflating life, intelligence and consciousness, Creation stands as a model of clear, independent thought, impassioned reason and well-founded speculation.

 

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