On emergence, agency, and organization

Abstract

Ultimately we will only understand biological agency when we have developed a theory of the organization of biological processes, and science is still a long way from attaining that goal. It may be possible nonetheless to develop a list of necessary conditions for the emergence of minimal biological agency. The authors offer a model of molecular autonomous agents which meets the five minimal physical conditions that are necessary (and, we believe, conjointly sufficient) for applying agential language in biology: autocatalytic reproduction; work cycles; boundaries for reproducing individuals; self-propagating work and constraint construction; and choice and action that have evolved to respond to food or poison. When combined with the arguments from preadaptation and multiple realizability, the existence of these agents is sufficient to establish ontological emergence as against what one might call Weinbergian reductionism. Minimal biological agents are emphatically not conscious agents, and accepting their existence does not commit one to any robust theory of human agency. Nor is there anything mystical, dualistic, or non-empirical about the emergence of agency in the biosphere. Hence the emergence of molecular autonomous agents, and indeed ontological emergence in general, is not a negation of or limitation on careful biological study but simply one of its implications.An organized being is then not a mere machine, for that has merely moving power, but it possesses in itself formative power of a self-propagating kind which it communicates to its materials though they have it not of themselves; it organizes them, in fact, and this cannot be explained by the mere mechanical faculty of motion. (Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment [1987]: 221)

Reflections on the origin of life: More than an 'evolutionary' problem

“…We are now at a stage where a radically new causal regime operates: molecule groups generate a set of material patterns and structures (other molecules or molecule aggregates, such as peptide chains with catalytic capacity or lipid compartments with selective permeability (see Figure 3), which constrain the underlying processes and transformations so they recursively regenerate those structures and, later, the set of interactions that dynamically sustain the entire system. This is an idea that other authors (Kauffman & Clayton, 2006) have captured in terms of «constraint-work cycles», suggesting that constraint appears and spreads whenever there is a material configuration in a part of the universe that establishes these kinds of non-linear, recursive loops. They also stated that this is a key phenomenon in understanding the origin of life.…”

Can a Robot Have Free Will?

“…A system composed of parts, each of whose existence depends on that of the whole system is here termed a "Kantian whole", the archetypal example being a bacterial cell [32]. The origin of this terminology lies in Immanuel Kant's definition of an organised whole [33].…”

The minority report: some common assumptions to reconsider in the modelling of the brain and behaviour

“…If this growth involves radical novelty, as in the emergence of new dimensions or the addition of new states, a closed-form treatment of the resulting dynamically changing state £ utility landscape becomes impossible (cf. Kauffman & Clayton, 2006).…”