As part of the Workshop on Artificial Autonomy (WAAT) at this year’s ECAL in Paris I will be giving a short talk entitled:
A quantum theory of biological autonomy at the macro-level
Tom Froese and Takashi Ikegami
There is a peculiar irony at the core of biology that in order to fully understand an organism we have to kill it and dissect it. While the existence of an organism depends on self-determination and holistic integration, our knowledge of it depends on external control and decomposition. There is a deep tension between acquiring knowledge of another autonomous being and the persistence of that being’s very autonomy. But if complete knowledge of the living is in the end impossible, because the explanans ultimately requires the destruction of the explanandum, can there ever be an adequate science of life? We propose that a theory of biological autonomy that is modeled on the mathematical framework of quantum physics might be a workable alternative.
Want to know more? Click here to download the extended abstract.
