GROWING UP: EMERGING COMPLEXITY IN LIVING BEING

ABSTRACT

Biological systems live and grow. Many aspects are inherent to the concept of living, such as the adaptation, the interaction with the environment, and the ability to deal with limited resources. Living systems present multiple levels of organization, with elements at one level interacting and aggregating to create more complex behavior at a higher level. In recent years, many new techniques used to investigate the spatio-temporal activity in living being have demonstrated the presence of features common to the behavior of self organizing dynamical systems. Thus a question arises: Is this chaos useful to model living beings? The answer is very difficult to find. Many experimental data support the dynamic chaotic modelling of living systems. Complex behaviors such as perceiving, intending, acting, learning, and remembering arise as metastable spatio-temporal patterns of brain activity that are themselves produced by the cooperative interactions among neural clusters. In this article we present and discuss that question, and we try to give indication for a possible answer, with the aim of defining the basic features of a behavioral kernel for living artefacts.

This work has been carried on within the European Community Project IST-2000-29225, SIGNAL—Systemic Intelligence for GrowiNg Artefacts that Live.