The processing of information (analog/digital) is the causal factor of the emergence of natural hierarchies

Eugenio Andrade

Resumen


This paper defines living units of development and evolution as agents that selectively record a partial description of their environment. This perspective allows to understand the emergence of hierarchical organization as information processing that uses simultaneously analog and digital records. The varying weights of each informational source explain the emergence of levels of organization throughout a developmental trajectory. Two types of emergence will be considered, analog driven and digital driven. The former deals with the exploration of a new shape space and the definition of their very basic work-actions, bringing forth a qualitative new instance by self-organization; the latter deals with the exploration of fine-tuned shapes and derived work-actions in the previous shape space through expansions in the digital informational space as a result of increasing neutral differentiation within an existing level. The former requires openness and starts as an analog-analog recognition, while the latter requires closure. However, digital driven emergence can only be recognized as such when systems open up and manifests a new behavior. In consequence, evolving individuals keep their autonomy and evolvability by compromising between external circumstances (analog informative sources) and inner constraints (digitally recorded information) by the introduction of a new level.

 

Key words: Code duality, hierarchical organization, emergence, analog information, digital information, shape space, sequence space.

 


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