Technological Innovation as an Evolutionary Process
On a defense
of my viewpoint
Paul S.
Prueitt, PhD (mathematics) post doc (quantum neuroscience)
3/29/2004
7:53 AM
We should start with a reminder that the nature of life has not become perfectly understood and represented in a social consensus. Part of the outcomes from a National Project may be to help our society develop a deeper reflection regarding the nature of life.
For me, the concept of living system starts with Maturana and Varela’s notion of “autopoiesis”. The notion of autopoiesis gives a sense that a separation exists between the experiencing phenomenon and the environment of that phenomenon. I think also of Bandura’s concept of self-efficacy in a variety of contexts
Bandura, A. (1978). The self
system in reciprocal determinism,
in American Psychologist,
33, 344-358.
and
http://tip.psychology.org/bandura.html
However, my own concept has more of a thermodynamical - mathematics flavor, as expressed in what I called the “Process Compartment Hypothesis”, or PCH. In the concept, compartments are described as forming in a process where emergence intrudes on the other wise lawful behavior of action-reaction dynamics. The only place that emergence can occur is in systems having a flow of energy sustaining structure which is not a thermodynamical equilibrium (see the work of I. Prigogine).
Because of economic pressure and the reality of asymmetric threats, our world society needs a new notion of intellectual property ownership. This new notion must intrude on the business/political processes. A small group of scientists and innovators are aware that these current processes have so far not allowed science to guide the expression of innovation as newly adopted technology. The new technologies are Human-centric Information Production (HIP) because they depend on the human cognitive acuity to work.
The love of mathematics is conditioned by my belief that the concerns of individuals like I. Rashevsky and Robert Rosen, who were key contributors to early biomathematics, have to be addressed in our modern society if we are to understand the nature of information.
The fact is that we, as a society, do not understand the nature of information. The more important fact is that parts of our society have created businesses that depend on the confusions that we have about the nature of information. Much of this confusion is legally grounded in a hundred thousand software patents – most which claim that the computer can do things like make “sense” of information and organize to satisfy the human need for information.
The science suggests that computers do not make sense of things and do not know the meaning of bits that cause state changes in the memory and processor. But part of the academic community and most of the Information Technology business community act as if computers can know and experience information.
Our planning is for
and my motivation is made very transparent in the working papers.