Developments in cognitive science, AI, and artificial life force us to consider minds and intelligences that are different from human minds. The dominant contemporary metaphor for any kind of mind is based on an understanding of the human brain and human experience, both of which frequently presuppose a notion of self. In some disciplines, including Buddhism, contemporary philosophy of mind, and cognitive science, much debate has focused on the nature of the self, and one insight from all these domains is that while we are strongly attached to notions of stable selves, it is also possible to conceive of selves as dynamic, interconnected, and illusory. We suggest that an interdisciplinary approach, drawing on fields with well-developed models of self in relation to agency, can offer new insights. We suggest that the view of self as illusory, and awareness of this illusion, in both human and non-human minds, may augment and qualitatively change the agent's affordances, or range of possible actions.

Criticality is thought to be crucial for complex systems to adapt, at the boundary between regimes with different dynamics, where the system may transition from one phase to another. Numerous systems, from sandpiles to gene regulatory networks, to swarms and human brains, seem to work towards preserving a precarious balance right at their critical point. Understanding criticality therefore seems strongly related to a broad, fundamental theory for the physics of life as it could be, which still lacks a clear description of how it can arise and maintain itself in complex systems. In order to investigate this crucial question, we combine critical learning with evolutionary simulation for a population of Ising-embodied neural networks, striving to find resources distributed over a 2D environment. The results show compelling dynamics in the combination of critical learning with evolutionary computation, highlighting the exploratory nature of critical systems and the pragmatism of evolutionary algorithms. We also analyze the genotypic exploration strategy, exhibiting a tension between local and global scale adaptation.

The complete Proceedings of the The 2018 Conference on Artificial Life: A Hybrid of the European Conference on Artificial Life (ECAL) and the International Conference on the Synthesis and Simulation of Living Systems (ALIFE)