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RE: The biology of the possible: what artificial life can teach us about the nature of living systems
I like to wonder about the nature of autopoiesis itself from time to time. How some positive feedback loops give rise to something new while some end in "death". The limiting rate would appear to be energy efficiency from the medium but some systems while inefficient, can support themselves by pure signaling to higher orders of complexity that apport bigger sources of energy. It all looks to me, quite similar to games and gamification.
@ertwro, it really looks like it, isn't it?
For me AL really made it more clear that when it comes down to interaction and selection of pathways, endless processes of repetition and iteration play a big part. I can see, for example, molecules like proteins interacting with each other in this way, triggering chain reactions that could have productive outcomes (and therefore remain in the pool of selected paths, "alive"), or do nothing and become a dead end.
I have to say that I need to read more of Maturana and Varela's work on this; re-reading the books I listed above re-sparked my interest in the topic!