Onar wrote:
> The toy is not a dissipative system, and autopoietic systems MUST
> be dissipative in order to be alive. One of Maturana's biggest
> bummers was not to limit autopoiesis to dissipative structures. He
> was ready to deem his simple computer models alive because they
> satisfied his autopoiesis. His computer model did indeed have an
> autopoietic structure, but lacked the dissipative element.
Computer systems are, in general, necessarily dissapative. There is
a subset of (mechanistic) computational processes ('reversible
computations') that are not, but most software and computation is not
restricted to this subset. Most computation involves a loss of
information - this is necessarily so if you are using a finite
computer for many computations.
See Zurek,WH (1990): Algorithmic Information Content, Church-Turing
Thesis, Physical Entropy, and Maxwell's Demon. In: Complexity,
Entropy and the Physics of Information. (Ed: Zurek,WH)
Addison-Wesley, Redwood City, California, 73-89
and (I have not to hand the exact reference so this is from memory)
something like "Emergent computation at the edge of chaos" by
Langton,C. (maybe someone could help with this).
There are others on reversible computation and the essential
distinction but I forgotten them also! <!:-(
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Bruce Edmonds
Centre for Policy Modelling,
Manchester Metropolitan University, Aytoun Building,
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e-mail b.edmonds@mmu.ac.uk
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