#hyperlife

The chapter "An Open Universe" in Kevin Kelly's book "Out of Control", Kelly poses the ambitious question; 'What is life?' while differentiating the real from the artificial, and attempts to give it meaning applicable to the modern technological era.

At the beginning of the chapter, Kelly delves immediately into setting the science of artificial life apart from the science of biology. Kelly states;

"BIology seeks to understand the living by taking it apart and reducing it to pieces. Artificial life, on the other hand, has nothing to dissect, so it can only make progress by putting the living together and assembling it from pieces."

Because the concept of artificial life is relatively new, it lacks the complex and intricate pieces that work together in order to produce what humanity knows as natural or organic life. Thus, artificial life must take what information is already in existence and configure it in new way to create a semblance of new life.

Kelly goes on to explain that artificial life can take many forms and introduces the term 'hyperlife'.

For instance, institutions such as schools, businesses, and organizations are bustling with life of many working individuals and programs. For this, they have been metaphorically deemed 'alive'. According to Kelly, it is correct to assume that such institutions are living, and take on the form of an organism.

Kelly defines this broad scope of individuals coming together on a large scale 'hyperlife'.

"Hyperlife is a particular type of vivisystem endowed with integrity, robustness, and cohesiveness - a strong vivisystem rather than a lax one"

Such systems could include but are not limited to a city, a virus, a rainforest, an artificial intelligence software, or a network and it's operator. Much like organs work together to make an organism, individuals work together as a sub-species of hyperlife.

Despite the similarities shared between organic life and artificial life there are still distinct characteristics which set them apart in order to form a necessary differentiation.

As humans continue to expand upon what is hyperlife, it will begin to gather and construct more data and eventually grow into other systems. Gradually, this process of expansion will intensify and the processes of hyperlife organisms will develop to (and even surpass) that of human capabilities.

The possibilities presented in artificial life technology are outstanding and almost unfathomable. The more hyperlife expands, more opportunities present themselves for gathering and organizing information on subjects once unknown to humanity. The more lifelike hyperlife becomes, humans will be able to study processes similar to that of the human brain (Von Neumann architecture).