If t he field of Artificial Life (“ALife”) i s successful, we will be forced to confront some difficult moral and philosophical issues which we might otherwise have been able to avoid. The ability to create new life forms as well as destroy existing ones will place a greater responsibility upon us. In addition, the existence of living systems within computer-simulated environments will present some new and unusual moral issues, as a result of the nature of computers and our control over them. lt is the purpose of this paper to stimulate some questions that we may be forced to directly confront in the future; this paper will not attempt to resolve these issues. It is the author’s hope to encourage speculation about the moral role of scientists engaging in ALife endeavors, and to remind the ALife scientist that this research does not take place in a moral vacuum.

We examine herein some aspects of the mind/brain problem as they have been approached from a standpoint of mimesis. Such studies are usually prefixed by the adjective “artificial,” as in “artificial intelligence”; “artificial life,” etc. A key assertion of such approaches is embodied in the familiar “Turing Test” ; that two systems which behave “enough” alike are alike. Specifically, that a properly programmed finite-state device (i.e., a Turing machine) which behaves “sufficiently” intelligently is intelligent; or, contrapositively, that any system which behaves intelligently can be replaced by such a device. We place such mimetic approaches into a historical context, and contrast them with paralleI scientific approaches to the same questions. We argue that there is no finite threshold, beyond which “enough” commonality of behavior allows us to conclude an equation of causal underpinnings with finitely-generated syntax typical of algorithmic devices, and hence that assertions like Turing’s Test are false.