Date/Time
Date(s) - 13/11/2003
8:00 pm - 9:00 pm

Title: Network Origins Lecture: Molecular Autonomous Agents

Speaker: Dr. Stuart Kauffman

Institute: Bios Group
Santa Fee

Location: ITB-137

Description:

A Possible Physical Definition of Life

Living organisms appear to act “on their own behalf”, ie. they do things that promote their own survival. I will call a system that has this ability an “autonomous agent”. Even simple organisms like bacteria are able to respond to presence of nutrients in their environment and swim towards them. We might say that a bacterium is “going to get food”. But a bacterium is “just” a physical system. So what must a physical system be to constitute an autonomous agent? My definition is that it must reproduce and carry out thermodynamic work. I will develop this definition, show an example of a hypothetical molecular autonomous agent, and discuss the progressively stranger implications of this definition.