Pretend you want to use his opinion as better than most anyones on where to invest some money....
CONVERSATION : LIFE
THE ADJACENT POSSIBLE
A Talk with Stuart A. Kauffman [11.9.03]
An autonomous agent is something that can both reproduce itself and do at least one thermodynamic work cycle. It turns out that this is true of all free-living cells, excepting weird special cases. They all do work cycles, just like the bacterium spinning its flagellum as it swims up the glucose gradient. The cells in your body are busy doing work cycles all the time.
Introduction
Stuart Kauffman is a theoretical biologist who studies the origin of life and the origins of molecular organization. <strong>Thirty- five years ago, he developed the Kauffman models, which are random networks exhibiting a kind of self-organization that he terms "order for free.</strong>"<strong> Kauffman is not easy. </strong><ul><em> ( Like Kalman's. like the FFE)</em>
His models are rigorous, mathematical, and, to many of his colleagues, somewhat difficult to understand. A key to his worldview is <strong>the notion that convergent rather than divergent flow</strong></ul>
plays the deciding role in the evolution of life. He believes that the complex systems best able to adapt are those poised on the border between chaos and disorder.
Kauffman asks a question that goes beyond those asked by other evolutionary theorists<strong>: if selection is operating all the time, how do we build a theory that combines self-organization (order for free) and selection? The answer lies in a "new" biology, somewhat similar to that proposed by Brian Goodwin, in which natural selection is married to structuralism.
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Lately, Kauffman says that he has been "hamstrung by the fact that<strong> I don't see how you can see ahead of time what the variables will be. You begin science by stating the configuration space. You know the variables, you know the laws, you know the forces, and the whole question is, how does the thing work in that space? If you can't see ahead of time what the variables are, the microscopic variables for example for the biosphere, how do you get started on the job of an integrated theory?</strong> I don't know how to do that. I understand what the paleontologists do, but they're dealing with the past. How do we get started on something where we could talk about the future of a biosphere?"
<strong>"There is a chance that there are general laws. I've thought about four of them. One of them says that autonomous agents have to live the most complex game that they can.</strong><ul>
<strong> The second has to do with the construction of ecosystems.</strong> The third has to do with Per Bak's self-organized criticality in ecosystems.<strong> And the fourth concerns the idea of the adjacent possible.</strong></ul>
<strong> It just may be the case that biospheres on average keep expanding into the adjacent possible.</strong><ul>
<em>For me the woe investors in QUIK, those who hold shares and say, "woe is me for holding this position"</em>
I see QUIK in this adjacent possible sphere... big time and growing.
By doing so they increase the diversity of what can happen next. It may be that biospheres, as a secular trend, maximize the rate of exploration of the adjacent possible. If they did it too fast, they would destroy their own internal organization, so there may be internal gating mechanisms. This is why I call this an average secular trend, <strong>since they explore the adjacent possible as fast as they can get away with it. There's a lot of neat science to be done to unpack that, and I'm thinking about it."</strong>
Con sider this as a mental model of those in the stage 2-3 of Bob West's potential customers
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they explore the adjacent possible as fast as they can get away with it. There's a lot of neat science to be done to unpack that, and I'm thinking about it."</strong>
that's how it is. Not revenue this Q. But how much will it come to be?
—JB
<strong>STUART A. KAUFFMAN, a theoretical biologist, is emeritus professor of biochemistry at the University of Pennsylvania, a MacArthur Fellow and an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute. Dr. Kauffman was the founding general partner and chief scientific officer of The Bios Group, a company (acquired in 2003 by NuTech Solutions) that applies the science of complexity to business management problems.</strong></ul>
He is the author of The Origins of Order, Investigations, and At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization.
Stuart Kauffman's Edge Bio Page
Is QUIK part of the sensor adjacent possible?
<em>You bet. How much is that worth?</em>
THE ADJACENT POSSIBLE
(STUART KAUFFMAN): In his famous book, What is Life?, Erwin Schrödinger asks, "What is the source of the order in biology?" He arrives at the idea that it depends upon quantum mechanics and a microcode carried in some sort of aperiodic crystal—which turned out to be DNA and RNA—so he is brilliantly right. But if you ask if he got to the essence of what makes something alive, it's clear that he didn't. Although today we know bits and pieces about the machinery of cells, we don't know what makes them living things. However, it is possible that I've stumbled upon a definition of what it means for something to be alive.
<strong>For the better part of a year and a half, I've been keeping a notebook about what I call autonomous agents. An autonomous agent is something that can act on its own behalf in an environment.</strong>
That is QUIK as a mental model. Is GG smart? Maybe, BUT IF he is why doesn't he start writing about this NOW?
Too focused on Israel, ie his cause to see anything else?
Indeed, all free-living organisms are autonomous agents. Normally, when we think about a bacterium swimming upstream in a glucose gradient we say that the bacterium is going to get food. That is to say, we talk about the bacterium teleologically, as if it were acting on its own behalf in an environment. It is stunning that the universe has brought about things that can act in this way. How in the world has that happened?
As I thought about this, I noted that the bacterium is just<strong> a physical system; it's just a bunch of molecules that hang together and do things to one another. So, I wondered, what characteristics are necessary for a physical system to be an autonomous agent? After thinking about this for a number of months I came up with a tentative definition</strong>.
My definition is that an autonomous agent is something that can both reproduce itself and do at least one thermodynamic work cycle. It turns out that this is true of all free-living cells, excepting weird special cases. They all do work cycles, just like the bacterium spinning its flagellum as it swims up the glucose gradient. The cells in your body are busy doing work cycles all the time.
<strong>Definitions are neither true nor false; they're useful or useless. We can only find out if a definition is useful by trying to apply it to organisms, conceptual issues, and experimental issues. Hopefully, it turns out to be interesting.</strong><ul>
Once you are in the adjacent possible os sensor fusion the future does not STOP, have an end point, you just cannot do it all.
Dr Saxe's demand that he has will NOT stop, it will grow, QUIK does not have a diminshing horizon, rather infinately expanding, the goal for them is to stay focused and not jump......
PS they have filled 2 more of the job opportunities. The jobs filled are split into India and CA and that puts us over 100 folks and adds another 20 man yrs to the wheels. To ask questions here and not know this stuff, when it can be easily obtained says a lot about the passivity of folks here. You can attack all you want, but do some work for yourselves if you have significant $$ in this business. For me it is a business, it is NOT a stock.
