CAUSAL STRUCTURES IN BRAINS AND MACHINES
Robert Rosén · International Journal of General Systems · 1986
We present some formal and empirical evidence to support the proposition that maximally constrained mechanical systems exhibit some of the basic properties of organisms and of machines. We show further that although such maximally constrained systems seem thereby extremely limited in their possible behaviors, they can be programmed to introduce a limitless plasticity in their behavior without breaking their constraints. We then turn to the ambiguities inherent in the word “machine”, and show that programming, in the above sense, introduces a new relation among machines; namely simulation of one machine by another. This simulation relation has none of the nice properties familiar from mathematical machine theory, basically because the causal structure in the simulator is completely different from the corresponding structure in what is being simulated. A few general implications of this state of affairs, mostly to biological problems, are discussed.