Life As It Could Be: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Artificial Life

Theme

The interdisciplinary field of Artificial Life (A-Life) is widely considered to have gained visibility with a September 1987 workshop organized by Christopher Langton at Los Alamos National Laboratory, followed by a landmark edited volume two years later. Emphasizing the investigation of “life as it could be” with self-organization as a conceptual cornerstone, A-Life research united computational, experimental, and theoretical approaches. In subsequent decades, A-Life attracted philosophical attention—with the landmark volume The Philosophy of Artificial Life edited by Margaret Boden in 1996—and diversified across computational analysis, laboratory-based experimentation, and bioinspired robotics. Today, A-Life functions as a thriving trading zone where diverse disciplinary perspectives—biology, cognitive science, physics, computer science, chemistry, mathematics, philosophy, art, and engineering, among others—converge. As the 40th anniversary of Langton’s volume and the 30th anniversary of Boden’s volume approach, the time is ripe to reevaluate the past, present, and future of A-Life research, bringing together scientists and philosophers from varied backgrounds.

This mini-symposium will provide a forum for discussion of A-Life’s objectives, overarching theoretical frameworks, main achievements and shortcomings, and prospects for the coming decades of scientific inquiry into what life is and could be—in silicon, in laboratories, and perhaps beyond Earth.

Call for Abstracts

We welcome contributions from theoretical and empirical researchers—philosophers and scientists alike—interested in fostering interdisciplinary dialogues on the past, present and future of A-Life as a scientific field.

We invite submissions of abstracts (max. 500 words) for presentations. Abstracts must include affiliation and contact information. Please send the abstracts to Alejandro Fábregas-Tejeda via email (alejandro.fabregastejeda@kuleuven.be). Deadline: October 23rd 2026. Notifications of acceptance: October 30th 2026.

Some of the themes and topics that we will cover include (but are not restricted to):

• What are the objectives of A-Life as an interdisciplinary field? What can the history of A-Life teach us about which questions to carry forward and which to retire?
• What does the field of A-Life offer that is unique or of value to the philosophy of science?
• What role does the study of self-organization play in research into artificial life?
• What distinguishes strong A-Life (genuine instantiation of life) from weak A-Life (simulation and modeling)? How to determine the threshold between them?
• When does a simulation or synthetic system constitute evidence of the general properties of life-as-it-could-be?
• Which overarching conceptual/theoretical frameworks have proven most fruitful in A-Life investigations, and why?
• What are A-Life’s genuine successes, and by what criteria should they be judged?
• What has A-Life contributed to adjacent disciplines (e.g., cell and developmental biology, evolutionary biology, cognitive science, origins-of-life research, astrobiology, and artificial intelligence) that those fields could not have produced on their own?
• Which empirical findings in A-Life defy the soundness of our extant theoretical frameworks, and how can our theoretical frameworks be better tested experimentally?
• What are the main empirical challenges currently facing the field of A-Life?
• Whither A-Life research? What trajectories are in store for the field?

Source and more details: https://hiw.kuleuven.be/clps/events/life-as-it-could-be-interdisciplinary-perspectives-on-artificial-life/symposium-lifeasitcouldbe/home