General Theory of Exobehaviours: A New Proposal to Unify Behaviors - Foundations on Natural and Artificial Computation - page 23

2 A Physicalist Classification of Behaviors
The first element of the GTE is a physicalist definition of behaviors. By ob-
serving the behavior of living beings and autonomous non-biological systems,
one finds: motor behaviors (e.g. movement of animals, robots, or plant leaves),
luminescent behaviors (e.g. firefly), active mimicry behaviors (e.g. Chameleon),
electrical behaviors (e.g. Electric eel), behaviors of excretion (e.g. octopus) and
change of phenotype (e.g. Escherichia coli). In all these behaviors there are three
characteristics:
1. There is a energy source capable of generating a continuous flow of energy
that either works on a feature of the system, or leaves the system and affects
the environment.
2. The energy source is not regulated from outside the system. That is, nothing
from outside the system can directly induce, graduate or stop the source of
energy.
3. The energy flow is not directed from outside the system. So, nothing from
outside the system is capable of choosing the way of the energy within the
system.
Using the above characteristics it will be defined the type of phenomenon that
will be explained by the GTE, which will be called exobehavior.
Definition 1 (Exobehavior of a system). When a system has energy flows
that are not directed from outside and the energy sources of these flows are not
regulated also from outside, the sequence that is generated to order temporally
all the values of energy flows that acts on its characteristics will be called the
exobehavior of the system.
In the definition of exobehavior has to be noted that an exobehavior lasts as
long as the system has energy (e.g. in the case of a living being throughout all
his life).This differs from what is commonly understood by behavior, because in
psychology, or ethology, behavior is a very specific sequence of actions beginning
with the introduction of a living being in an environment, or when submitting a
new stimulus to it, and lasts as long as the living being stays in the environment,
or while its response to new stimuli lasts.
Since the GTE is a theory that covers biological and nonbiological autonomous
systems, it does not use the term “live”, which it is replaced by “exoactive”. A
system is exoactive when it performs an exobehavior.
It should be noted that the energy flow at the macroscopic level may be
continuous or discontinuous. If the system has a continuous flow of energy it can
always carry out its behavior; if it is discontinuous it can not. For this reason, if
the flow of energy is not continuous system behavior is called semiexobehavior
since when energy flow is interrupted the behavior of the system does not depend
on itself. In the case of the flow of energy being directed externally but not
regulated, or inverse, the behavior of the system is called subexobehabiour .