Relativistic Ontologies, Self-Organization, Autopoiesis, and Artificial Life: A

In a sister paper, we have looked at the philosophical aspects of the development of autonomous systems, touching upon the inadequacies of conventional (positivistic) ontologies and philosophies of science, and we have described an alternative relativistic ontology. We argued that self-organization is a necessary condition for autonomous systems and we high-lighted the difficulties that this raises for conventional representational approaches to autonomous systems. We discussed a methodology for dis-course in relativistic ontology (Systematics) and, based on this, we argued in favour of a spectrum of autonomy. In this paper, we try to show how autopoiesis can be interpreted as a particular instance of autonomy in this spectrum. We now proceed to describe the progress which has been made towards the development of a computational simulation of autopoi-etic organization, beginning with a formulation in terms of the Calculus of Indications (incorporating Varela’s extensions to include autonomous forms), and incorporating the Systematic formulation. 1 Designing Autonomous Systems In a companion paper, we developed a well-founded characterization of au-tonomous systems, from a philosophical standpoint. This characterization is grounded upon the acceptance of a relativistic ontology — positing a spec-trum of existence and being — wherein autonomy is seen as a characteristic ∗David Vernon is presently on leave at the Commission of the European Community. 1 of a system above a specific level of being. This level is ‘marked ’ by the or-ganization exhibited by the entity and autonomy arises once a critical level of self-organization is achieved. Our task now is to take this philosophical char-acterization and develop it into a scientifically-useful theory. To do this, we will first make two diversions from our route to this goal, diversions which will ultimately return us to our path better equipped to achieve our objective