Welcome to the webpage of the workshop on Goal-Directed behavior in life and non-life, to be held as part of the 2024 Conference on Artificial Life (https://2024.alife.org/workshops.html).
The goal of this workshop is to attract researchers trying to understand the occurrence of goal-directed behavior in all its forms and provide them with an informal and friendly venue to share current ideas. We also want to give people new to the topic an idea of the work happening in this fascinating research area.
Call for abstracts:
Living organisms appear to exhibit “goal-directed behavior”, i.e. they appear to act in order to achieve goals. Goals include intrinsic goals like persistence and growth as well as more mundane things like “more ice cream”. A typical example is a chemotactic bacterium, which survives by sensing and moving toward food in its environment. However, currently, there is no established theory expressing:
How the established models of matter used in physics and chemistry can give rise to phenomena / structures / systems / individuals for which it can be decided whether they appear or are goal-directed.
What exactly it means to appear or be goal-directed i.e. how to decide for a given phenomenon / structure / system / individual whether it appears or is goal-directed.
How goal-directedness is connected to life / artificial life and the origin of life / artificial life in particular.
How goal-directedness is connected to thermodynamics / statistical physics.
Such a theory would help understand the gap between the seemingly purposeless universe of nonliving matter and the goal-filled world of life.
We invite you to revisit and share current views on the questions above. We are particularly interested in work starting out from dynamical systems including artificial physics and chemistries (cellular automata, reaction diffusion systems, chemical reaction networks) as models of matter, however all work relevant to the above questions will be considered.
Apart from these more particular topics we also invite submissions that present existing or novel views on more general questions like:
Why goal-directed behavior is (or isn't) important for a scientific understanding of the world and life / artificial life in particular?
What role goal-directed behavior plays in the world?
How to define, operationalize, or utilize the notion of goal-directed behavior?
What are the kinds of things that can exhibit goal-directed behavior (or behavior in general)?
What are open problems related to goal-directed behavior?
Generally, we favor contributions relying on well defined concepts over informal perspectives but in the end what matters is that the arguments are good.
Submission:
If you wish to present your ideas and/or results in this workshop please apply by sending your abstract to: goaldirbehavior@gmail.com
Deadline: 19 May 2024 (AoE/UTC-12)
Preliminary program is available.