Kauffman, Stuart A. Investigations: The Nature of Autonomous Agents and the Worlds
They Mutually Create
September 13, 1996.
Kauffman,
Stuart A. “What is life?: was Schrödinger right?” p 83-114 What
is Life? The Next Fifty Years, Michael P. Murphy and Luke A. O’Neill,
eds. Cambridge University Press 1995. ;
Liane Gabora’s AUTOCATALYTIC CLOSURE IN A COGNITIVE SYSTEM: A TENTATIVE SCENARIO FOR THE ORIGIN OF CULTURE;
I am skeptical of Kauffman’s brave thrust but I can find no worse
pessimism to throw at it than Kauffman has already provided
in his introduction.
Yet two small points.
Thermodynamics, which he looks to as a role model of a new
kind of science, deals at its core with averages.
Evolution thwarts averages by selecting the unusual and greatly amplifying it.
I think that this is equivalent to edge of chaos observations.
I fear that evolution theorists, being themselves creatures
of evolution, cannot foresee future evolution, just as a computation
cannot be generally predicted short of running the computation.
Perhaps all evolution theory must be retrospective.