The Adjacent Possible

One of the most interesting aspects of the creation of new patterns and "stories" is that there are always aspects of a system that are beyond the capability to know ab initio. Stuart Kauffman discusses this issue in great detail in his book Investigations. He claims that the phase space for biology can never be completely defined, because the order of possible interactions is so large that it is essentially infinite and that in a way, there are always aspects of a system that are beyond our knowledge until they actually occur.

This makes me wonder if there is a way to shortcut the "innovation" process. Say, for example, one has two widgets. These widgets would have a fantastical, magical behavior, if they were able to enter into a specific configuration with respect to one another (e.g. a rule set) at the right place in space and time. In Stuart's book, he references the flying squirrel, whose abnormality in skin proves to be incredibly useful in the right context, when a hawk attempts to swoop down and eat the poor little animal (e.g. some aspect that seems apparently random or even a hindrance, ends up being very useful). Now in this case, it seems that there is no way of knowing ahead of time the usefulness of extra skin flaps when presented with an unbelivable number of possible circumstances that any object can enter in the course of its existence.

But, on the other hand, what if there was a way to create some sort of function, or program that searches specifically for new and innovative tools. Say, for example, this function was recursive, insomuch as it would use new tools (or patterns) to improve itself and its searching ability. This function would grow and morph into something more complicated as time went on. It would need a substrate on which to grow, and a plethora of information and constraints to establish incentives for it to innovate. Patterns in a vaccuum are relatively useless, but patterns that serve a purpose are infinitely more interesting and meaningful.

And here is where the tough questions begin to arise. Can such a function define its own purpose? Or does said purpose have to be constructed artificially ahead of time? These are difficult questions that may take some serious investigation to answer. It seems possible that such a program could start out with a very simple purpose, which as a by product of its activities would change in some way, and in turn would cause the function to change as well. A simple purpose would be an optimization problem...to see if the function could find a solution to the problem. But as the function analyzed and searched for a solution, it would change the landscape of the problem space, causing it to have to develop further more complicated techniques to search for a solution. The question becomes, how does one couple the search for a solution to the solution itself, and how can one incoporate the necessary freedom to allow for unpredictable but interesting behavior.

There is much to think about and elaborate on in the coming weeks and months.