Engineering Persuadable Matter

My latest publication, commenting on a paper about agential chemistry, from my own computational perspective.  This topic falls in the intersection of Artificial Life and Unconventional Computing, forming a research area I am intensely interested in.

Susan Stepney. Engineering Persuadable Matter: A Comment on Armstrong’s ‘Life, Mind and Matter’. Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective, 14(3):33-42, 2025.

Rachel Armstrong (2024) advocates for a new approach to ‘agential chemistry’, a form of ‘new materialism’ that allows matter to take an active role. Here I comment on some of these ideas through a computational lens: the consequences if agential chemistry can perform computation to advance its own agenda; how it might provide the structure and dynamics needed for computation, and the metadynamics for open ended systems; and how it opens the possibility of a new technological discipline of engineering ‘persuadable’ agential matter.

While searching for an image to use to spice up this post, I came across an interesting Medium piece that forms a nice overview of some of the issues, from a neural AI perspective.  And has the pretty image I use above (click to embiggen).