| Description |
Gregory Bateson (e.g., 2002, p. 85ff; 2000, p. 457-460) construed knowledge to be the propogation of "difference" in a complex network, noting (2000 p. 460) that "the transform of difference travelling in a circuit is an elementary idea." The idea of difference is coded as 0 and 1 in Boolean systems. Kauffman (1993) developed NK Boolean computer simulations as a way explore how the structure of genomes might self-organize into emergent form (see Kauffman, 1995, p. 76 for a simple, concrete example). The N in NK Boolean systems refers to the number (N) of abstract entities called Nodes; in Kauffman's simulations N was very large, as high as 100,000 (1995, p. 83). The K refers to the number of inputs (from other nodes in the network) that each node has. Kauffman states that "While this is surely an idealization, we can extend it to networks of genes and their productrs interacting with one another in enormous webs of regulatory circuitry," (1995, p. 99). This reasoning parallels Bateson's idea of mental process. Indeed Bateson includes genetic activity as a part of mental process, stating that "the phenomena we call thought, evolution, ecology, life, learning and the like occur only in sytems that satisfy these criteria," (2002, p. 86). Mind and nature are, as his book title (Bateson 2002) states, are a necessary unity. |
