Hyperorganism
Hyperorganism explores life in all its possible forms, including forms we cannot readily observe or recognize as organisms. Its name combines the idea of hyperobjects with research into artificial life, cyborgs, morphogenesis and living organization across scales.
Each topic is a living review: mechanisms, demonstrated capacities, competing explanations and open questions. Papers, code, demonstrations and artworks are connected without treating them as the same kind of evidence.
Origins and forms of life
- Recognizing Life - What observations distinguish living organization from plausible nonliving alternatives?
- Origins and Synthetic Life - How does living organization arise, and what can be constructed?
- Digital Life - What can computational worlds reveal about reproduction, adaptation, ecology and evolutionary novelty?
Organization across scales
- Active Matter - How does local energy consumption generate motion and physical organization?
- Morphogenesis - How do spatial patterns and bodies develop, maintain form and regenerate?
- Collective Life - How do interactions generate collective behavior, ecological organization and sometimes new evolutionary individuals?
- Biospheres and Technospheres - How do life, environment and technology reshape planetary dynamics?
Bodies, cognition and computation
- Embodiment - How do bodies and environments contribute to behavior, control and adaptation?
- Biohybrid Systems - How do living and artificial components function together?
- Basal Cognition - Which minimal systems sense, remember, learn and regulate behavior, and how can those capacities be tested?
- Unconventional Computing - How can physical, chemical and biological dynamics implement specified computations?
- Consciousness - What warrants attributing experience across unfamiliar organisms or substrates?
Art and interpretation
- Systems Aesthetics - How do artists work with processes, emergence and living materials?
Across topics
- Autonomy and viability - What maintains the system, and what does its environment or apparatus supply?
- Evolution, evolvability and open-endedness - Adaptation, new capacities and changes in evolutionary possibilities.
- Ecological organization - Resource exchange, persistence and dependence without assuming organismal unity.
Sources have one main discussion, with connections elsewhere. Open questions are editorial.
Shared foundations
- Possible minds - Proposes mapping what different systems can do and which mechanisms support those capacities. The space has many dimensions and discontinuities, rather than a single scale or a binary mind/no-mind boundary. Sloman 1984.
- Artificial life - The first ALife workshop joins computational and physical synthesis to the study of living systems. Langton frames the aim as studying “life as it could be.” Workshop 1987; proceedings 1989. Langton 1989.
- Open problems in artificial life - Fourteen problems connect life’s emergence, evolutionary potential and relations between living processes, mind and culture. A historical agenda for assessing proposed forms of artificial life. Bedau et al. 2000.
- Hyperobjects - Morton describes entities whose vast spatial and temporal extent exceeds ordinary object-centered understanding. A philosophical influence on this project’s scope. Morton 2013.