Embodiment Processes and Biological Computing

Abstract

As we have just remarked, at the biological (and creative) level, the original, developmental and selective source, while transmits and applies its message, constructs its own structure. The transmission content is represented by the progressive “revelation” through forms of the very source, of the self-organizing (and emotional) “instructions” concerning, each time, its actual realization at the surface level and its primary operational closure. This closure realizes its own invariance and, at the same time, its metamorphosis by means of the full unfolding of a specific embodiment process, by means of replication and by means of a continuous production of varied complexity. The final result of this process cannot be seen as a simple output: “the phenome” (according to the terminology proposed by H. Atlan¹) completely determined by an input string (the genome). It by no means represents, however, an output determined only by a mapping function, so that the resulting structure appears as not encoded at all in the input string. On the contrary, the transmission of the information content on behalf of the source appears to be a process of realization, revelation and “renewal” of itself, a process realized, in particular, in accordance with the conditions proper to a coupled system: as a matter of fact, at the biological level the function necessarily self-organizes together with its meaning thereby avoiding (as linked to the stake) Scylla (the simple dissipation) and Carybdis (the pure crystallization). Hence the necessity at the level of life of the continuously renewed realization of a specific compromise: the “aperiodic crystal”, as Schrödinger called that particular intermediate state represented by DNA.