Artificial Autopoiesis

Maturana and Varela consider self production as an important aspect of life, if not the most important one.

John von Neumann studied cellular automata (CA), as simple mathematical programs that build themselves. In ``Principles of Biological Autonomy,'' Varela actually writes programs that produce membranes, and some structures that look like living cells. Finally Stephen Wolfram has proven that one CA acts like a universal computer, as a Turing Machine.

In this note I explore artificial structures so precisely presented that can produce themselves, and therefore I call them: Artificial Autopoietic Objects.

The missing ingredient in my thinking had been the distinction that Karl Menger makes of three types of variables.

``Investigation of the semantics of pure and applied analysis reveals that there exist three different concepts of a variable, which may conveniently be described as a logical, a scientific, and a mathematical concept.''

Taken from JSTOR.

The way Calculus is presented in most textbooks, does not distinguish between these three variable types. As a consequence when computers are fed our half baked ideas, we get bad answers. Computer scientists all by themselves have produced types of variables for practical reasons. When physicists get into the fray, like Dennis Ritchie,  Jack Wisdom, and Stephen Wolfram; they can move at the three levels identified by Menger. Here I make an effort to set the foundations of a study of artificial autopoietic objects (aao).

Given the preliminary state of my ideas, I do not give a precise definition, I see the irony.

Context

Biological evolution is acting right now in Homo sapiens. Human productions like the Ego, started sometime in the past; maybe ten thousand years ago when a woman in the Balsas river, nearby Chilpancingo where I am writing this, took tezontle , and realized that something good could come of it. She worked day in and day out, then her daughter, and her daughter's daughter, for thousands of years. She and the men of the Mexican people living here saw the elements, coming and going. Raining in June, and harvest in September. Besides corn there was calabaza, chile, and epazote. Actually there was so much food, that they were convinced this was a sacred place, and it was. To this day on May 3 in Ostotempa, people go to ask for rain, like they have done for thousands of years.

The proximity of this fact had obscured my thinking for many years, as to the real nature of Information. My brain is building itself right now. I have this cosmic event under my nose, so I had missed it. My brain produces itself, but I will not call it artificial, an artificial autopoietic object, is a product of the brains of people working together inside culture, with the property of making copies of themselves without further human intervention.

I see connections to Richard Dawkins' concept: meme.

An aao will be a meme, but with the main property of autopoiesis. 

aao

Examples: program that produces program, collections of such programs producing an ecosystem, i.e., they are hierarchies.

When I write a Scheme program with this property, I'll get back to you.

I do want to present to you two years very important for Human Evolution. 1687: Newton's Principia; 1955: Menger's Calculus.