On Wed, Jun 29, 2011 at 12:38 PM, Alan Kay <alan.n...@yahoo.com> wrote: > Thanks for the references to The Chemoton Theory -- I hadn't seen this > before. > > But I didn't understand your reference to Bergson -- wasn't he an adherent > of the Elan Vital as a necessary part of "what is life?" and that also drove > evolution in particular directions.
you're welcome. The interesting part of about Chemoton Theory is that the first papers were written contemporaneously with Eigen's RNA world theory and Maturana and Varela's autopoiesis ideas. The Bergson reference was cryptic. Sorry about that! He did write about Élan Vital, but in my understanding it doesn't represent a transcendental category but is rather a name for a self-referential process by which objects/virtualities/... differentiate. The clearest exposition I've found on this is the last chapter of Deleuze's Bergsonism. The aspect of Bersgon that I was thinking about though was the concept of duration, particularly that of the cerebral interval (the time between a received movement and an executed movement), which generates perception. Yet perception is both matter (made of up of neurons, cells, chemical networks, sensors, ...) and the perception of matter. It's a self-loop of something perceiving itself. We see the same kind of self-loop pattern in von Foerster's Cybernetics of Epistemology and Notes on an Epistemology of Living Things where computation is understood as com + putare or thinking together. Where Bersgon was talking about human perception, I think his ideas can be taken all the way down to the basic (theoretical) units of life that Ganti describes in Chemoton Theory where instead of a cerebral interval, there's a metabolic interval. The metabolic interval is the time of adjustment and reaction to environmental conditions (the cell shrinks, grows, chemicals flows with varying degrees and directions) that is a direct result of the structure of an auto-catalytic loop. By virtue of this self-loop, novel conditions develop through differentiating patterns of chemical flow that hook on to the metabolism, over time developing into more and more complex structures with new hierarchical levels. I should point out that I'm not saying this is how life happened, but rather that I believe it's a compelling way to approach conceptualizing about how computational systems could be cast in a biological perspective. I tend to think of computation as mathematics + duration and biology as chemistry + duration. Computational systems does not have to mimic in a literal way what biology does, which is what I see most systems doing. wes _______________________________________________ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
