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p.6 Biological and social systems need an understanding of phenomena such as self-organization and self-regulation, coherent behavior over time with structural change... In a concise way, this new understanding may be characterized as process-oriented, in contrast to the emphasis on "solid" system components and structures composed of them... Emphasis is then on the becoming - and even the being appears in dynamic systems as an aspect of becoming. The notion of system itself is no longer tied to a specific spatial or spatio-temporal structure nor to a changing configuration of particular components, nor to sets of internal or external relations. Rather, a system now appears as a set of coherent, evolving, interactive processes which temporarily manifest in globally stable structures that have nothing to do with the equilibrium and the solidity of technological structures.
p.6 Caterpillar and butterfly, for example, are two temporarily stabilized structures in the coherent evolution of one and the same system.
p.7 Autopoiesis refers to the characteristic of living systems to continuously renew themselves and to regulate this process in such a way that the integrity of their structure is maintained.
p.7 Whereas a machine is geared to the output of a specific product, a biological cell is primarily concerned with renewing itself.
p.8 The directedness of evolution now may be understood post hoc as the result of the interplay of chance and necessity (Riedl, 1976); necessity is introduced by the systems constraints which are themselves the result of evolution. [JLJ - and perhaps as well for game theory, it is chance that determines what our available moves are, and necessity which determines that we search only the most promising or most interactive paths. Therefore, our move is chosen via the interplay of chance and necessity. Hmmm.]
p.10 The dynamics of such a globally stable, but never resting structure has been called autopoiesis (self-production or self-renewal). An autopoietic system is in the first line not concerned with the production of any output, but with its own self-renewal in the same process structure. Autopoiesis is an expression of the fundamental complementarity of structure and function, that flexibility and plasticity due to dynamic relations, through which self-organization becomes possible.
p.19 Self-organization is the dynamic principle underlying the emergence of a rich world of forms manifest in biological, ecological, social and cultural structures... self-organization dynamics becomes the link between the realms of the animate and the inanimate.
p.24 Quite generally, a system becomes observable and definable as a system through its interactions.
p.32 a system is called open that maintains exchange with its environment... and that is open toward the new and unexpected
p.33 The function of a system embraces the total characteristics of its processes, including the relations with the environment and the system organization, but beyond that the kinetics of the individual processes also and their interaction. The logical scheme of relations appears here in the framework of time.
p.33 A system is autopoietic when its function is primarily geared to self-renewal.
p.34 The structure of a system has long been understood primarily in terms of its spatial structure. In connection with dynamic systems, however, the notion of a space-time structure is of importance, or in other words a structure given in a particular moment of time which represents not only the spatial arrangements, but also the kinetics effective in this moment at each spatial point... A time sequence of space-time structures yields the total system dynamics... It may be organized from outside the system, such as in the case of a machine operated from without, or it may be self-organizing.
p.35 At higher levels of self-organization, however, to an increasing extent a description will suggest itself which views energy systems manifesting themselves in the organization of material processes and structures.
p.40 A system which is too small will always be dominated by the boundary effects. Only beyond certain critical dimensions do the non-linearities find an opportunity to unfold their characteristics and may bring a selection of new structures into play resulting in a certain autonomy of the system with respect to its environment.
p.40 The natural dynamics of simple dissipative structures teaches the optimistic principle of which we tend to despair in the human world: The more freedom in self-organization, the more order!
p.42 Any structure may be driven beyond a threshold into a new regime when the fluctuations exceed a critical size. This corresponds to a qualitative change in the dynamic existence of the system. The transition to a new dynamic regime renews the capacity for entropy production, a process which may be viewed as life in a broad sense. Life always carries on.
p.46 Chance and necessity appear here as complementary principles, that is to say, as integral aspects of one and the same process. Quite generally spoken, a complementary view is akin to process thinking.
p.47 The penetration of fluctuations and the formation of new dissipative structures depend on sufficiently dense packing on the one hand and on flexible, not too strong and rigid coupling on the other.
p.50 Carl Friederich von Weizsacker (quoted in: Ernst von Weizsacker, 1974) calls information that which generates new information.
p.51 Pragmatic information... changes the receiver. A machine may receive some news and afterwards still have the same expectation for receiving identical or similar news. But a human being will change his expectations... "Information is what generates information potential."
p.53 After the formation of an autopoietic structure, however, the system oscillates in a balance between novelty and confirmation and has to do work only to the extent that novelty must be coped with continuously... This work, or entropy production, never becomes zero because the structure is "kept busy" by novelty entering through the exchange with the environment. [JLJ - when playing a complex game of strategy, we have to do "work" only if one of our creatively-produced ways of proceeding passes a diagnostic test of some kind which indicates it might be also be a practical way of proceeding - or if there is a "trick" of some kind which might be playable. Then we will have to spend some time to determine - with more certainty - whether we have the adaptive capacity to "handle" this both "novel" and "potentially practical" way to proceed.]
p.55 The biophysicist Aharon Katchalsky... postulated (Katchalsky, 1971) that any system which includes a large number of non-linear elements which are coupled diffusely and therefore interact almost like in a continuum, may be driven into non-equilibrium by increased energy penetration and will then exhibit the typical behaviour of dissipative structures, namely, autopoiesis and system evolution.
p.75 The evolution of the universe is the history of an unfolding of differentiated order or complexity... Unfolding... implies the interweaving of processes which lead simultaneously to phenomena of structuration at different hierarchical levels. Evolution acts in the sense of simultaneous and interdependent structuration of the macro- and the micro-world. Complexity emerges from the interpenetration of processes of differentiation and integration, processes running "from the top down" and "from the bottom up" at the same time and which shape the hierarchical levels from both sides.
p.81 Matter is more or less durable and may be regarded as some form of "frozen" energy. [JLJ - perhaps this is how we should think of game pieces in a complex game of strategy.]
p.120 the achievements of the prokaryotes were not rendered invalid, but served as a platform for the next start.
p.134 If the microevolution of life starts with an emphasis on confirmation, the macroevolution starts from the other end, from novelty. From both sides, the balance increases. The resulting optimization of balanced pragmatic information may be called the real triumph of the principle of co-evolution of macro and microcosmos in the realm of life.
p.141 The more complex the system becomes, the larger the share of the energy throughflow which, at a given moment, is stored in the system (Morowitz, 1968). It is the structures which are capable of influencing their own future with the least energy that have the least difficulties in evolving.
p.146 The environment which is modified by the organism forms an ecological niche. This niche, however, undergoes further changes in co-evolution with other niches in the ecosystem... Each niche, in turn, exhibits certain elements to which the organism is not well adapted and which give rise to a state of tension or "stress". With this stress, certain... potentials are brought into play which, in turn, may contribute to the modification of the niche.... in the living out of relationships... it is determined which part of the total... potential is activated. [JLJ - very concise explanation which is useful for game theory]
p.157 One of my house ferns, from which I am learning a lot [JLJ - ?? how foolish of me not to learn anything from my house plants. They might have much to teach, and they are very nearby.]
p.157 In principle the learning capability does not require a nervous system or brain.
p.162 In a dynamic view... Mind is immanent, not in solid spatial structure, but in the processes in which the system organizes and renews itself and evolves. An equilibrium structure has no mind... mind reaches beyond the autopoietic structure proper and embraces also the interactions with other systems and generally with the environment. [JLJ - or my view, mind is immanent in the necessary schemes which are formed for the purposes of living and reproducing.]
p.164 With the self-reflexive mind, a new and very essential element is called into play, anticipation - in a passive sense as expectation and anticipated experience, in an active or creative (goal-setting) sense as creative design of the future... Active or creative anticipation... seems to appear only with highly evolved animals.
p.170 There is always some bias with which the image of the outer world is formed. This subjective attitude is already evident in the way in which sensory data are registered and processed. The brain destroys in several steps of abstraction part of the information - that part which cannot be expressed in the mental situational model (Stent, 1972).
p.171 The emanations from the environment are not accepted passively, but we meet them with a subjective model which is meant to order them... The structures which we perceive in the outer world are essentially based on the structures of our inner world... A direct grasp of reality in the way we grasp a solid object is not possible - it emerges only in the experience of mutual, cyclically organized processes.
p.184 Evolution is basically open. It determines its own dynamics and direction. This dynamics unfolds in a systemic web which, in particular, is characterized by the co-evolution of macro- and microsystems.
p.196 Learning is... the mobilization of processes which are inherent to the learning system itself and belong to its proper cognitive domain.
p.196 In... older system theory, Ross Ashby's (1956) "law of requisite variety" claimed that for the control of its environment a system required a greater variety of relations, i.e. higher complexity, than the environment. But in life, the issue is not control, but dynamic connectedness.
p.202 It has already become evident here that evolution is basically a gigantic, multifaceted learning process, in its overall effect not a heuristic process in which the goal... is given, but an open learning process.
p.217 The dynamics of a particular system may always be viewed under two perspectives: a microscopic one - processes which play in a system - and a macroscopic one - the behaviour of the system viewed as a whole.
p.221 All knowledge is based on experience... this experience is accessible by intuition
p.225 At each level of autopoietic existence... there is a holistic criterion - or perhaps more than one - for the self-determination of the system with regard to its stability in the presence of fluctuations and thus to the space-time structure which it chooses... A particularly important criterion is increased flexibility to cope with the unexpected.
p.228 Margalef (1968)... each community seeks information from the environment, but only to use this information to prevent the assimilation of more new information.
p.229 the task of life is the never-ending transformation... of novelty into confirmation.
p.230 Indeterminacy is the freedom available at each level... Evolution is the history of an unfolding complexity... Out of this fog emerge the contours of a world in which nothing is random but much is indetermined and free within limits... Life is intensity. Evolution acts in the direction of enhancing this intensity.
p.232 a few basic characteristics of evolution should be kept in mind... Most important is the basic openness of evolution toward the future... there is practically always a multiplicity of future structures and of processes leading to them.
p.236 Not only the experience of past evolution, but also the experience of anticipated future evolution vibrates in the present.
p.237 Ivan Illich (1976)... defined health not as a specific state, but as the intensity with which an aware organism copes with its environment.
p.238 Morphological structures may be studied in the present, dynamics only in a temporal extension.
p.238 time- and space-binding is the evolutionary way to the direct experience of a four-dimensional reality, the space-time continuum which is, on the one hand, created by evolution and in which it unfolds on the other hand... Time- and space-binding come into effect step by step.
p.246 Walking over red-hot stones on Bali or the Fuji islands, putting needles through cheeks and tongues or eating glass from India to Indonesia [JLJ - all of these are more likely for me to do, compared to submitting another article for an academic Journal.]
p.251 I believe that the most important task today is the search for new degrees of freedom to facilitate the living out of evolutionary processes. [JLJ - perhaps this is also the task of the machine 'playing' a complex game of strategy. Or rather, the task of the programmer constructing the scheme - which the machine then executes.]
p.255 Self-organizing non-equilibrium systems, however, may be unstable and yet exist - by evolving. It is sufficient that the processes between subsystems are fast enough to damp smaller and medium fluctuations and to maintain the system in a state of metastability. Thereby, the shift to a new structure is delayed during a finite period which is sufficient for the unfolding of life processes... No complex system is ever truly stable; it is always, as long as it maintains its structure, metastable. This kind of dynamic existence, therefore, makes a tremendous increase in complexity possible.
p.255 To live in an evolutionary spirit means to engage with full ambition and without any reserve in the structure of the present, and yet to let go and flow into a new structure when the right time has come.
p.256 it is no longer whole structural platforms, whole civilizations, societal systems, art and life styles which must jump to a new structure. A pluralism emerges in which many dynamic structures penetrate each other at the same level. In such a pluralism, there is no longer the familiar evolution in big step functions. Change, increasing in absolute measure, occurs not only vertically, in historical time, but also horizontally, in a multitude of simultaneous processes, none of which necessarily has to assume destructive dimensions.
p.261 Evolution creates wholeness which interacts autonomously with other wholeness.
p.271 some goals may only be reached by taking detours and by following possible process networks... In an evolutionary spirit, creative processes ought to be permitted to interact freely and to find their own order of evolving structures. Dunn calls this approach "evolutionary experimentation". Its original image is the movement of bacteria. Running phases in one direction alternate with tumbling phases... The direction taken in the running phase is arbitrary. And yet the bacterium shows a net movement in the direction of optimal food concentration... Eventually, such a random biased walk, as it is called in technical terms, leads unerringly to the highest food concentration (Boos, 1978). [JLJ - perhaps a random walk through the literature, followed by a tuning stage where the more interesting of the works are read more deeply or intensely, can lead one to uncover/discover theory appropriate for solving one's problem - whatever it is. This general approach appears to have guided my research efforts over the last 10 years... I am amused that simple bacteria have beaten me to the approach.]
p.271-272 Modern corporate long-range planning, as I have sketched it above, helped indeed to introduce the flexibility which is also a characteristic of open evolution. The formulation of punctual and structural goals frequently is not taken literally and absolutely, but as an indication only for the direction in which to start. As experience accumulates in pursuing such goals, they become modified, they change almost beyond recognition, and sometimes they are totally abandoned... In this kind of open-ended planning, as in all open evolution, the purpose is not waiting at the end of our path into the future, but is immanent in the process itself. Knowing is ultimately possible only by means of doing.
p.280 The evolutionary trend toward higher flexibility becomes much more effective at the human level than in ecosystems with older and less complex life forms... Man is not only capable of much faster learning processes and thus of quicker adaptation to environmental changes but he is also made by evolution for a life of high uncertainty and the absorption of much novelty. Organisms which appeared earlier in evolution are normally highly specialized
p.286 "When the camera is running, the film makes itself totally by itself," the French film director Jean Eustache emphasizes. [JLJ - perhaps, by a similar kind of logic, when the game pieces are configured to represent a game of strategy in progress, the game plays itself, totally by itself.]
p.286 Roland Fischer (1970) writes of evolution as "the creative process in statu nascendi" and adds that "what we are used to call 'creative', is only a weak reflexion of the forces which have produced us".
p.288 Processes are no longer played, but unfold, interact, join to form dynamic structures which undergo an open evolution... Grotowski has realized, like Prigogine, that live order forms by itself, if processes are allowed to unfold.
p.291 Of Niels Bohr, for example, it is reported by his close collaborator Leon Rosenfeld (1967; quoted in Feyerbend, 1975, p. 24) that "he never regarded achieved results in any other light than as starting points for further exploration. In speculating about the prospects of some line of investigation, he would dismiss the usual consideration of simplicity, elegance or even consistency with the remark that such qualities can only be properly judged after the event..." Since, however, science is never a completed process, Paul Feyerbend (1975) draws the conclusion that simplicity, elegance or consistency are never necessary conditions of scientific practice.
p.291 Creativity is not a state but a process.
p.294 The creative process consists of giving form to vision.
p.296 Creativity is nothing else but the unfolding of evolution.
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