Psychological expreiments have confirmed that our experience of being is
dependent on the degree of deformation/compensation in the system. By putting
test subjects in a completely stimulusless environment, reducing inner
deformation to a minimum and instructing them to cease all thought, a feeling of
non-existence was induced in the subject.
This simple experiment alone suggest two things which are in alignment
with autopoiesis:
1) friction and sensation are closely related. (stimuli may be seen as a kind of
friction/deformation)
2) autopoiesis is a super-efficient, frictionless mode of organization.
(demonstrated by the experience of non-existence)
This cannot be supported by formal notions, but the intuition is quite clear:
sentience is connected to friction and friction is connected to energy
dissipation. I have argued earlier that in order for the low-level friction to
crystallize in the form of large-scale sentience, there must be "contact"
between micro and macro level. There is no such contact between hardware and
software in a computer (illustrated by the Chinese room). Stretching the
computer analogy: software and hardware must be one and the same thing. A
similar point was made by Jeff in another post, namely that the genome
substantially differs from a computer program due to the fact that it is both
hardware and software.
But in terms of autopoiesis "hardware" would not mean the actual atoms
and molecules of the system, but rather the *interaction* and relations of the
processes and components. Hence the physical interactions constitutes the
"hardware", while the circular organization of the relations constitutes the
"software". In my view the best candidates for such process oriented
harware/software systems are dissipative structures. First of all they operate
in a mode of constant friction, but most importantly there is contact between
micro and macro level. The microdynamics of the systems resonates up to a large
scale structure. This is why I suspect them to be the building blocks of
sentience.
Onar.