Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Fig. 15.1
Combinatoric and
creative emergence
additional organisational and functional primitives are needed. If one wants to un-
derstand how an organism functions as a coherent, self-sustaining whole, one needs
more than reductive parts-lists and local mechanisms. One needs concepts related to
organisation and function, and knowledge of the natural history of how these have
arisen. Living systems are distinct from nonliving ones because they embody par-
ticular organisations of material processes that enable organisational regeneration
through self-production (Maturana and Varela
1973
). Biological organisations also
lend themselves to functional accounts that describe how goal-states can be embed-
ded in their organisation and how goals can reliably realised by particular arrange-
ments of processes. Full molecular descriptions of organisms do not lead to these
relational concepts. Similarly, full molecular descriptions of brains and electronic
computers, though useful, will not tell us how these systems work as information
processing engines. If artificial systems are to be designed and built along the same
lines as organisms and brains, new kinds of primitives appropriate for describing
regenerative organisation and informational process are required.
15.2.2 Primitives and Interpretive Frames
Once one has defined what the primitives are or how they are recognised, then one
has constructed a frame for considering a particular system. To say that an entity
is “primitive” relative to other objects or functions means it cannot be constructed
from combinations of the other entities of that frame, i.e. its properties cannot be
logically deduced from those of the other entities. Although it may be possible, in
reductionist fashion, to find a set of lower level primitives or observables from which
the higher level primitives can be deduced, to do so requires a change of frame—one
is then changing the definition of the system under consideration.