So far, there is no known instance of a completely new form of life having been created by artificial means. This fact stands in conceptual tension with the widespread belief that the problem of life has been “solved” long ago. It also stands in practical tension with the decades of concerted effort to create life from scratch by combining the best that cutting-edge science and engineering has to offer, spanning fields such as artificial life, synthetic biology, origins of life, and astrobiology. In this presentation I suggest that we should take these outstanding challenges at face value and interpret them as indications that we are not looking at the phenomenon of life in the right way. Accordingly, I will take a step back and inquire into the necessary conditions of existence in general. Why is there something present rather than nothing? I will then highlight that the essential conditions for existence of the domain of physical being – which essentially combine a capacity to spontaneously change with the enabling constraints imposed by a historical trajectory – have an abstract correspondence with the conditions of the domain of living being. I suggest that it is the capacity for spontaneous change that is most resistant to our attempts at creating artificial life. Metaphorically speaking, while we can strive to build an inviting home for life to show up in the lab, we cannot force life to accept the invitation and move in.

So far, there is no known instance of a completely new form of life having been created by artificial means. This fact stands in conceptual tension with the widespread belief that the problem of life has been “solved” long ago. It also stands in practical tension with the decades of concerted effort to create life from scratch by combining the best that cutting-edge science and engineering has to offer, spanning fields such as artificial life, synthetic biology, origins of life, and astrobiology. In this presentation I suggest that we should take these outstanding challenges at face value and interpret them as indications that we are not looking at the phenomenon of life in the right way. Accordingly, I will take a step back and inquire into the necessary conditions of existence in general. Why is there something present rather than nothing? I will then highlight that the essential conditions for existence of the domain of physical being – which essentially combine a capacity to spontaneously change with the enabling constraints imposed by a historical trajectory – have an abstract correspondence with the conditions of the domain of living being. I suggest that it is the capacity for spontaneous change that is most resistant to our attempts at creating artificial life. Metaphorically speaking, while we can strive to build an inviting home for life to show up in the lab, we cannot force life to accept the invitation and move in.

We introduce the Concurrent Modular Agent (CMA), a framework that orchestrates multiple Large-Language-Model (LLM)-based modules that operate fully asynchronously yet maintain a coherent and fault-tolerant behavioral loop. This framework addresses long-standing difficulties in agent architectures by letting intention emerge from language-mediated interactions among autonomous processes. This approach enables flexible, adaptive, and context-dependent behavior through the combination of concurrently executed modules that offload reasoning to an LLM, inter-module communication, and a single shared global state.We consider this approach to be a practical realization of Minsky's Society of Mind theory. We demonstrate the viability of our system through two practical use-case studies. The emergent properties observed in our system suggest that complex cognitive phenomena like self-awareness may indeed arise from the organized interaction of simpler processes, supporting Minsky-Society of Mind concept and opening new avenues for artificial intelligence research. The source code for our work is available at: https://github.com/AlternativeMachine/concurrent-modular-agent.

My contribution reflects on a ground breaking new experiment with the Alter3 android robot designed by Takashi Ikegami, Takahide Yoshida, Norihiro Maruyama, Atsushi Masumori, and colleagues. The experiment is currently running at the Venice Biennale, engaging visitors in an open-ended dialog in any human language. The experiment enhances the physical and sensory-motor capabilities of Alter3 with LLM technology, both for the chatbot style interaction with the public and for the internal cognitive architecture inspired by Minsky's Society of Mind framework. Based on an analysis of the logfiles, I will show why this experiment is a breakthrough in making artificial cognitive agents lifelike. I will focus in particular on the role of a dispositional 'linguistic' memory that uses language for storing, retrieving and reusing information and on the role of different conflicting internal personae that influence overall behavior in unpredictable, but nevertheless meaningful ways.