In summer of 1997 I interned at the Santa Fe Institute. Barry McMullin was there as well, using swarm (an early cellular automata library) to reimplement and extend the original autopoiesis algorithm. His report: https://www.santafe.edu/research/results/working-papers/comp...

And a later study by him: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15245628/

Autopoiesis.

That word alone brings me back to systems engineering, and how everything was "like a biological cell" in modern practice.

Reminds me of:

https://distill.pub/2020/growing-ca/

"Differentiable Model of Morphogenesis"

Let return to Kant’s third antinomy.

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.

Love the word "Autopoietic", nobody really knows about it and any text that uses it for sure will capture my interest.

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.