The Gap Is Relational - Open-endedness, Biological Information, and the Limitations of In Silico ALife

We assess the challenges posed to the project of implementing ALife in silico by relational approaches to life, and in particular the argument that living systems actively produce the space in which they evolve. We argue that biological open-endedness is fundamentally grounded in an active process in which organism “bring about” biological information. We propose the formal concept of contextuality as a basis to articulate a framework representing biological sense-making, and explain open-endedness. On this basis, we argue that open-ended living systems may be reproduced in silico – if and only if we adequately integrate contextuality in their computational architecture.