Guiseppe,
Thank you for your succinct comments.
Embryogenesis, autopoeisis, autocatalysis,
and all similarly intoned generative processes
would likely fall under the broadest categorical
reach of Robert Rosen's notion of 'entailment'.
At least for the present, no contrived systems
'designed' by human thought, achieve the extent
of co-integration at -al- levels of performance,
that living systems do ... from the atomic and least
complex molecular interactions levels, through chemical
and biochemical, through organelle and structural,
through '.....', ... and so on.
At the very best / very least , our sentience may eventually
be able to re-enact (using pre-existing primal components called
'atoms') to explore integrated combinants of atoms and molecules
and subsequent systems, that the 'natural' universe was able
to previously attempt yet.
Just like it took several stellar cycles to produce atoms
of sufficient mass and complexity to build the minimal
components eventually usabe to achieve our current scope of
generated biology, it might be an aspect of entail-ableness
(extended exploration of new organizational options where
the systems are satisfactorally entailed again) - that
the phylogeny is an on-going exploration process.
That such things as nano-tubes and buckyballs and similar,
now being integrated with native natural tissue to achieve
new integrations and systems relations, well, the 'universe'
might not have been able to priorly construct usable
quantities of this material and only now, through entailed
present-sentient participation -will- have such resources,
and our activities might herald in some new tier of 'living
organization(s)'.
Or, quite reasonably, such materials -were- preiorly composable
through non-human 'natural' production, but the degree of
entailableness of these optional structures was not sufficient
to meet the standard of multi-integration that 'living systems'
require. I.e., such stuctural entities may have been, or may
-be-, highly utile in some ways, but thoroughly non-utile and
entailedly sterile and non-connectible in others - which would
be just as important.
For example, some molecules are stereo-molecularly compatible
and connect/deconnect in metabolically useful ways. There
are related molecules, also with compatible stereo-molecular
aspects, but when those ones join, they cannot dis-join,
and suddenly there is non-metabolic garbage in the middle
of dynamic cytoplasm.
Single use or limited use structures are of little advantage
in living systems. Components which can restructure and re-cycle
and re-order and help the entire entity maintain and repair and
re-vitalize, -are- the hallmark components of living - completely
or majoratively - entailed systems.
Jamie Rose
Ceptual Institute
bcc: jr
Giuseppe Longo wrote:
>
> There are at least two crucial differences between a biological system
and
> an artificial one.
>
> 1- The first is built top-down, the second bottom-up. Embryogenesis
> begins by a unique cell, which differentiates into tissues and organs.
> This espablishes a peculiar causal regimes, where various levels of
> organisation are causally entangled since the beginning (regulation,
> integration fluxes). So far, we are only able to construct artificial
> systems by assembling parts, from bottom. And this is probably inherent
to
> the very notion of (human) designed system.
>
> 2- All our machines are cartesian: they are made possible (and
> intelligible) by assemblying simple parts,
> which may lead to extremely complicated artefacts. Then the elementary is
> simple, as Descartes wanted us to decompose beings (and reasoning).
> Complexity, in natural systems, begins with the elementary components,
> which may be very complex. A single living cell is elementary (if
> decomposed, it is dead), but it is extremely complex.
>
> One could also observe that it is exactly this elementary component of
> live that in no way we can reproduce.
> We are able to construct organs of all sorts, and even assembly
> them, but not a single cell, with its top-down generating process.
> I think that this is compatible with the great refections by Robert
Rosen.
> More may be downloaded from my web page.
>
> Giuseppe Longo
>
> Laboratoire et Departement d'Informatique
> CNRS et Ecole Normale Superieure
> et CREA, Ecole Polytechnique
> (Postal addr.: LIENS
> 45, Rue D'Ulm
> 75005 Paris (France) )
> http://www.di.ens.fr/users/longo
> et :
> CENtre d'Etude des systemes Complexes et de la Cognition (CENECC)
> http://www.cenecc.ens.fr/
>
> e-mail: longo@di.ens.fr
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Received on Wed Jan 25 16:16:03 2006
