Susan Stepney - Life as a Cyber-bio-physical System

This is interesting. See Martyna Marciniak and Semantic Closure. I found this talk whilst looking for Robert Rosen's posthumously published 1991 book Life Itself - A Comprehensive Enquiry into the Nature, Origin and Fabrication of Life. Here is a well-written review by Sarah Voss. See also Robert Rosen’s Relational Biology Theory and His Emphasis on Non-Algorithmic Approaches to Living Systems by Patricia A. Lane.

It's quite sane, but I think I could help with the meta-dynamics of open systems (31:20)

In short, the meta-dynamics of the open system is effectively the embodiment of the organisms' own cognitive system in its environment, so it's a shared interlocking and interdependent phase space. That is why I have so much trouble with the ideas of Levin and his followers who plug living tissue into a neural network and then select for certain behaviour they think will attract funding or attention or something, and it's invariably in very poor taste.

See also this correspondence of hers on Life, Mind and Matter: Chemistry for an Ecological Era by Rachel Armstrong. 

However she does leave me wondering, towards the end, "Why the hell would someone think that growing a skyscraper is a reasonable thing to want to be able to do?" See Life Is A Geo-biological Cyborg Fuelled by Minerals.

Subscribe to Department of Computer Science University of York.

And Rachel chimed in today:


See American Life. 

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