Fiction seems especially favored in this context, because it seems to survive longer in active cultural memory than other kinds of communicated idea. As a test of this, we could ask ourselves how much fiction, as opposed to nonfiction, we have either read or heard about, but was written before we were born. Artificial life and complexity science could substantially illuminate our understanding of fiction, but there are also contributions fiction could make to the ontological, epistemological, and ethical issues that have come up in the field of artificial life. In fact, this paper sees these issues as having rather severe and frightening ramifications for humanity, and sees dialogue between science and the humanities as being urgent and necessary. Fiction is one arena for such dialogues, but one hopes there are others.
Fiction can engage, and be engaged by alife at the level of all three claims.
But the human mind is, at least for the moment, demonstrably superior in many ways to a computer. But fiction through its very nature asserts human worth by an appeal to complexity. As John D. Barrow reminds us, the human brain is the most complex object yet disclosed in the universe. And fiction is one of the most complex forms of communication ever to pass from one human mind to another. But as noted earlier, stories are about the only things that do survive, so this suggests that little or nothing will get passed on at all.