Wednesday, January 25, 2006
Generative Methodology Glass Bead Games
Communication from Judith Rosen
Robert Rosen never said that we can't make a machine that repairs itself or that reproduces itself. He simply said that those machines are not and cannot be alive. The entailment structure underlying the behavior of any self-repairing/replicating machine is entirely different from that of living organisms. The difference between such simulations of life and actual living systems has to do with what entails the repair capability-- and with the simultaneous presence of the capability of metabolism-- and with what entails IT as well.
Bear in mind that RR defines "machine" in a very particular way. So by that definition, we will never create a living "machine"-- however, that does not mean that he felt it was impossible to create living systems. He told me himself that he was pretty sure he could do it. In that event, what has been created is not "a machine"-- regardless of what it is made out of. It's an organism.
The organization of a machine, by definition, is not complex; it's what he referred to as "simple" (regardless of how complicated it might be-- this is the difference between his definition of complexity and complicatedness). In contrast, the organization of any living organism is extremely complex. Complexity, as a "measure" of organizational type, is not about size or about structural intricacy, it's about the nature of the organization itself and what that multiplicity of relational interaction, cohesion, and dimension can generate in terms of material and temporal effects, etc. It's not important what the material aspects are, where living systems are concerned. It's about all the interactive relational stuff giving rise to effects and behaviors that none of those material parts would/could ever be capable of on their own. That's why it is often said that a complex system is "more than the sum of its parts".