Artificial Systems and Boundaries
Artificial systems, AI, borderline cases, minimal life, and the limits of biological organisation.
Articles
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Biological theory has long struggled with borderline systems such as viruses, dormant organisms, protocells, and synthetic constructs. APS reframes these cases by treating life as viability-oriented organisation rather than as a fixed categorical property. Borderline cases are therefore not failures of definition but expected features of a processual and organisational biology.
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This article clarifies how the Agency–Process–Scale (APS) framework understands artificial intelligence and artificial systems in relation to life, agency, cognition, and organisation. APS argues that life is not defined by intelligence, behaviour, or computational sophistication, but by viability-oriented, constraint-closed organisation. Artificial systems may simulate agency or exhibit forms of functional cognition, yet this does not by itself establish that they are living systems.