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. Cheers, Alan ________________________________ From: Wesley Smith <[email protected]> To: Fundamentals of New Computing <[email protected]> Sent: Wed, June 29, 2011 12:16:55 PM Subject: Re: [fonc] Eternal computing Related to the bio perspective on computation, has anyone on this list explored the ideas of Tibor Ganti's Chemoton Theory in relation to computation and programming? It's a really interesting example of how to abstract out the essence of biological systems in a way that simplifies without losing touch with reality. In one of his books, he even sketches out what a computational system based on such "fluid automata" might look like. In my own view, I see biological systems as an abstraction over chemical networks such that the biological system is constantly computing its own identity despite the continual material and energetic fluxes of its chemical components. In a sense, chemistry is functional (not unlike lambda calculus, see Fontana's Alchemy http://fontana.med.harvard.edu/www/Documents/WF/Papers/objects.pdf) and biology is akin to a virtual machine. The key difference between the two is self-referentiality. The biological system, based on an auto-catalytic metabolic cycle housed in a membrane can support worlds of chemistry that simply can't otherwise exist due to the kinetics involved. Metabolism provides both the perception and reaction to environmental conditions that enables biological systems to bootstrap themselves. I think there are a lot of lessons to be taken form these ideas that can inform the philosophy and structure of computational systems, particularly from a Bergsonian perspective. Actually building them directly will require exchanging wired connections for something that more closely mimics how fluids mediate the ad hoc and dynamic scaling of communication channels. http://www.chemoton.com/ http://home.planet.nl/~gkorthof/korthof66.htm _______________________________________________ fonc mailing list [email protected] http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
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