MODELLING AUTONOMY: concept, simulation and measure
As early as 1974 Maturana, Varela and Uribe's published a paper that included the first simulation model of an autopoietic system. Latter development of the concept of autonomy (Varela 1979) and its convergence with related concepts such as Rosen's closure to efficient causation, Kauffman's autocatalytic networks and Ganti's chemoton model (to mention but a few) has put autonomy at the center of research interest those researchers interested on the origins of biological and cognitive organization.
In the Proceedings of the First European Conference on Artificial Life [Varela & Bourgine (1991) Towards a Practice of Autonomous Systems. Proc. of the First ECAL, pages xi—xvi] a full research program on the artificial implementation of autonomous systems was envisioned. According to that view, autonomy was the fundamental property underlying both the phenomenon of life and cognition, so the challenge of the new artificial sciences (if they were to illuminate our understanding of those phenomena) consisted in the simulation or realization of systems with increasingly autonomous capacities. In other words, artificial autonomy was taken up as a difficult but achievable research goal, whose pursuing could, furthermore, contribute to merge the new and old paradigms of Artificial Life and Artificial Intelligence and to uncover some of the most elusive properties of biological organization.
More recently, Francisco Varela's passing away triggered a number of publications, conferences and workshops somehow reinforcing the research agenda on issues dealing with autonomy and autopoiesis at different scales (origins of life, immune system and neural dynamics, ...). At the same time recent advances in neurosciences and robotics, as well as in cellular modeling techniques have significantly contributed to the effort.
Therefore, we consider that it is a suitable time to evaluate the efforts made so far and try to assess to what extent the goal of an artificial autonomy is actually within reach or constitutes just a philosophically utopian quest. In order to do so, we propose a workshop focused on recent (if possible new, original) simulation models of autonomous systems, coming from the fields of biological and cognitive sciences (i.e., based on artificial chemistries as well as on artificial neural networks or dynamic sensorimotor controllers).
