Ben Gaskin and Simon McGregor organize a special session of The 2026 Artificial Life Conference titled “Artificial Life as Experimental Philosophy,” which will take place in Waterloo, Canada, from August 17 to 21, 2026.
Papers can be submitted until March 30, 2026. The call reads:
ALife has always had a markedly philosophical character – a fact not unnoticed by some philosophers. Daniel Dennett, for instance, saw in ALife the creation of testable thought experiments – in simulating a thing, you render explicit your assumptions. Despite this clear affinity, however, the engagement he foresaw has not materialised.
This is not for ALife’s lack of interest in or relevance to traditionally philosophical content, but perhaps rather for its practicing an alternate philosophy in which the reflexive relationship between pragmatic and theoretical is constitutive. Here philosophy and science are united, with thought in turn structuring and being structured by experimental practice. In this respect, ALife may be closer to the original tradition of natural philosophy than philosophy in its more modern disciplinary forms.
This session invites broad reflection on the nature of this relationship between philosophy and artificial life. What role do computational experiments play in philosophical inquiry – and what role should they? How does ALife address questions that philosophy also claims – agency, autonomy, emergence, individuality – and how does its treatment differ? The conference theme itself poses one such question: what is life, and what does it mean to be life-like?
Call for Papers
We welcome both experimental work whose philosophical motivations or implications are brought to the fore, and philosophical or theoretical work that engages directly with ALife methods and results. We are as interested in what can be said in principle as in what your work specifically reveals – and especially in work that does not sit neatly in either of these.
Questions of Interest
Questions we are interested in include:
- What are we doing when we simulate a thing?
- Where is emergence when it happens in a machine – how do silicon and simulations reshape the question of emergence?
- What is the relationship in simulations between form, function, parameters, and dynamics?
- If the rules are made up, what do they teach us – how do we reconcile tunability with the language of findings?
- What are the laws of motion of living matter, and how does ALife relate to theoretical biology?
- Is life just physics, or is there something more – what can ALife tell us about the relationship between vitalism and mechanism?
- What is ALife’s precedent, what does it inherit, and how does it differ – from the automata of Hero to the gavra of Rava to Jābir’s takwīn?
- Could artificial life ever really be alive – and if so, what are the implications?
- How does wet ALife relate to these questions – does it change what counts as artificial, as alive, or both?
These are examples, not boundaries – we welcome any work that engages with the philosophical dimensions of artificial life. Contributions from across ALife, philosophy, history and philosophy of science, and related fields are encouraged.
Submissions
Papers should be 3–8 pages in ALIFE format. We welcome experimental, theoretical, and position papers. Accepted papers will be published in the ALIFE 2026 proceedings (MIT Press). The conference is hybrid – presentations can be given in person or online. Please select the “Artificial Life as Experimental Philosophy” special session when submitting. For full formatting guidelines, see the ALIFE 2026 Call for Papers.