Autopoiesis and Enaction in the Game of Life - Randall D. Beer (PIBBSS Speaker Series)

The Nugget

Autopoiesis and enaction in Conway's Game of Life reveal how self-sustaining units (like gliders) form and interact within a deterministic universe. This model elucidates theoretical foundations of autonomy, interactions, and significance in complex biological and cognitive systems, helping bridge gaps between low-level physical processes and higher-level autonomous behavior.

Make it stick

🌱 Autopoiesis: Self-creation—systems that make themselves rather than reproducing copies.
🧩 Structural coupling: The dynamic interaction between an autonomous system and its environment, grounding the idea of enaction.
🚀 Glider: A simple moving entity in Conway's Game of Life, exemplifying how organized structures emerge and sustain themselves.
🌍 Domain of significance: How an autonomous system sees and interacts with its environment, imbuing some parts of the universe with meaning.

The 4E approach to cognition includes Embodied, Embedded, Extended, and Enactive cognition.
Inaction, the focus in this talk, deals with the co-emergence of identity and its world through actions.

Enaction involves autonomous organizations distinguishing themselves from surroundings, defining a domain of interactions that creates significance in the universe.
Derived from work by Maturana and Varela, the enactive approach broadens their concepts of autopoiesis (self-creation) and structural coupling (dynamic interactions).

Gliders in the Game of Life offer a concrete model to explore autopoiesis and structural coupling.
Despite their simplicity, gliders demonstrate self-sustaining behavior and interaction with their environment, mimicking biological systems in a toy model universe.

Processes in the cellular automata (Game of Life) map out dependency networks. These networks show how components sustain an entity like a glider.
Perturbing these networks helps analyze the robustness and interaction of these emergent systems.

Interaction between gliders and their environments results in a structured set of possible states and transitions.
Non-destructive perturbations of gliders fall into six classes, demonstrating a structured and predictable interaction model.

This two-way interaction is key in understanding how entities not only withstand but also affect their environments.
Structural coupling in this context reveals the processes by which environments and autonomous systems co-evolve.

In an animated discussion, the model shows how constitution (self-creation) and interaction (dynamic engagement with the environment) are interconnected.
The exploration also touches on how different forms of organization can persist and adapt in various environmental setups.

"Enaction is all about the co-emergence of an identity and its world of significance through its actions."
"The idea underlying autopoiesis is that some organizations of interdependent processes can become autonomous."
"Structural coupling is about the dynamic interaction between a system and its environment, which is the foundation of enaction."
"Gliders are persistent, bounded entities that reveal how autonomous systems can emerge and engage dynamically with their environments, even in a simple universe."
"This toy model lets us probe the theoretical foundations of autonomy and interaction, paving the way to tangible insights that verbal debate alone can't achieve."

This summary contains AI-generated information and may be misleading or incorrect.