Examinando por Autor "Heylighen, Francis"

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    Complexity and Evolution
    (MDPI, 2023-02) Veloz, Tomas; Heylighen, Francis; Witkowski, Olaf
    Understanding the underlying structure of evolutionary processes is one the most important issues of scientific enquiry of this century. In the twentieth century, scientific thinking witnessed the overwhelming power of the evolutionary paradigm. It not only solidified the foundations of diverse areas, such as cell-biology, ecology, and economics, but also fostered the development of novel mathematical and computational tools to model and simulate how evolutionary processes take place. In addition to the application of the evolutionary paradigm and the discovery of the evolutionary features for processes of diverse nature, there is another interesting aspect which touches upon the emergence of novel evolutionary processes. Namely, the emergence of an evolutionary process requires a complex transition between a prior form where no evolutionary process is undergoing and a posterior form where the evolutionary process has been triggered. Theoretical methods to describe the emergence of evolutionary processes require the consideration of complex systemic notions, such as self-organization, resilience, contex tuality, among others. Therefore, complexity and evolution became intertwined notions: evolution not only leads to but also depends on the development of increasingly complex forms and functions.
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    Goal directedness, chemical organizations, and cybernetic mechanisms
    (MDPI, 2021-08) Busseniers, Evo; Veloz, Tomas; Heylighen, Francis
    In this article, we attempt at developing a scenario for the self-organization of goal-directed systems out of networks of (chemical) reactions. Related scenarios have been proposed to explain the origin of life starting from autocatalytic sets, but these sets tend to be too unstable and dependent on their environment to maintain. We apply instead a framework called Chemical Organization Theory (COT), which shows mathematically under which conditions reaction networks are able to form self-maintaining, autopoietic organizations. We introduce the concepts of perturbation, action, and goal based on an operationalization of the notion of change developed within COT. Next, we incorporate the latter with notions native to the theory of cybernetics aimed to explain goal directedness: reference levels and negative feedback among others. To test and refine these theoretical results, we present some examples that illustrate our approach. We finally discuss how this could result in a realistic, step-by-step scenario for the evolution of goal directedness, thus providing a theoretical solution to the age-old question of the origins of purpose.
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    Towards an Analytic Framework for System Resilience Based on Reaction Networks
    (Hindawi Limited, 2022-06) Veloz, Tomas; Maldonado, Pedro; Bussseniers, Evo; Bassi, Alejandro; Beigi, Shima; Lenartowicz, Marta; Heylighen, Francis
    Reaction network is a promising framework for representing complex systems of diverse and even interdisciplinary types. In this approach, complex systems appear as self-maintaining structures emerging from a multitude of interactions, similar to proposed scenarios for the origin of life out of autocatalytic networks. The formalism of chemical organization theory (COT) mathematically specifies under which conditions a reaction network is stable enough to be observed as a whole complex system. Such conditions specify the notion of organization, crucial in COT. In this paper, we show that the structure and operation of organizations can be advanced towards a formal framework of resilience in complex systems. That is, we show that there exist three fundamental types of change (state, process, and structural) defined for reaction networks, and that these perturbations not only provide a general representation of perturbations in the context of resilience but also pave the ground to formalize different forms of resilient responses. In particular, we show that decomposing the network's operational structure into dynamically decoupled modules allows to formalize what is the impact of a perturbation and to what extent any potential compensation to that perturbation will be successful. We illustrate our approach with a toy model of a farm that operates in a sustainable way producing milk, eggs, and/or grains from other resources. With the help of simulations, we analyze the different types of perturbations and responses that the farm can undergo and how that affects its sustainable operation. © 2022 Tomas Veloz et al.