Origins of Goal Directedness Workshop - ALIFE22

19 July 2022 - 11:30 to 13:00 session 1 & 14:00 to 15:30 session 2

This workshop is based on the project "The Origins of Goal-directedness", which aims at developing a scenario for the self-organization of goal-directed systems out of networks of (chemical) reactions applying the formalism of Chemical Organization Theory (COT). Organizations specify the conditions for a reaction networks to self-organize into an autopoietic reaction sub-network. Goal-directed systems can be modeled as  autopoietic reaction networks that are resilient, i.e. able to reach the goal in the face of environmental challenges. The theory of cybernetics specifies the conditions needed for effective goal-directedness: reference levels for goals, negative feedback, requisite variety of actions and knowledge, hierarchy, feedforward and buffering. We will express these conditions mathematically in the language of COT, and then check in how far the evolved organizations satisfy these conditions. 

We will discuss explain the basics of our approach, new results, and we look forward that researchers involved in similar problems share their viewpoints. 

Organizer: Dr. Tomas Veloz (Director of SYMP group CLEA-VUB)

This Workshop will be given at CLEA, and will be streamed live to the large-scale 2022 Conference om Artifical Life, ALIFE22, (Trento, 18-22 July 2022). See official program.

Program: