Autopoietic Networks
gbragafibra.github.io
gbragafibra.github.io
It is both possible that all actions are fully freely determined AND that everything moves with mechanical necessity.
Poeisis (or autopoiesis) in its model assumes that the natal moment is BOTH freely determined (created out of itself) and necessary (created in a chain of effects). But this makes a fairly large, self-contradictory claim about production.
To paraphrase Nathaniel Mackey, there is always some inistent priority behind every natal occasion; but it comes within the expression itself and then masks its own conditions of possibility, so that what happened turns out to have been happening. And what is it that’s happening is concrete insofar as it can be determined by its natality, but not given by it, and certainly any claim of autopoesis stakes itself on the latter: that it stands as its own proof.
https://distill.pub/2020/growing-ca/
"Differentiable Model of Morphogenesis"
And a later study by him: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15245628/
That word alone brings me back to systems engineering, and how everything was "like a biological cell" in modern practice.
I've first thought of this within the concept of self-assembling autonomous agents in 2016. Good times dreaming about a future where AI permeates every facet our lives.
I think we're at a point where "online" stuff already permeates every facet of our lives. And many of these systems already employ "AI" (for very limited definitions of AI) at every step. You search based on embedding and language models. You get ads based on graph theory. You see friend's posts based on this. You get approved for a loan based on "AI", hell even some legal cases are handled by extremely badly implemented "AI" systems, and so on and so on.
I feel we're slowly approaching a phase where we could get that "sci-fi" like "personal assistant" that maybe can have access to all of our data, and can "act" in our best interests. Maybe when our data is considered, the "AI" assistant could have a say. Maybe it gets to decide when and how to share stuff. Maybe it gets access to the underlying algorithms and decides when and where to "agree" or "accept" our data being used for the average / median interest.
It seems plenty of systems already use that data in day-to-day life. I'm looking forward to having systems where the good parts can continue while the concerning parts (control over data, control over algorithms) is somehow limited. It's probably too much for a human, but I can see how we could all have "agents" that follow some of our interests and have a say in the process. It certainly seems closer than "sci-fi", closer than two decades ago.
[1] https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262536844/intelligence-emerging...