INDICE Human beings versus machines, or machines as instruments of human designs? Living systems. Human beings. Organisms and Robots. Technology and reality. Art and design. Desires and responsibility. Reflections.

Organisms and Robots.

Both, the living system (organism) as a natural entity, and a robot as a product of human design, are structure determined systems in dynamic operational coherences with the structure determined medium or circumstance in which they exist as what they are. The difference between them is in the way in which their respective operational coherences with their circumstance arose in their history of origin. The robot arises through design. An artist or an engineer makes a design by disposing a set of elements and a configuration of relations between them in a way that they constitute a dynamic totality in dynamic congruence with a medium that has also been designed as such ad hoc. So, the robot, the medium or circumstances in which it operates, and the dynamic congruence between the two is the consequence of an intended design in what one might say is an ahistorical process. Robots, therefore, are ahistorical entities. Yet, since they are the product of an attempt to obtain some operational result in the future, they exist in a historical domain.

Living systems originated in a different manner. All living systems living now on the earth, are the present of a still going on history of production of lineages of living systems through the reproductive conservation of living as well as of variations in the manner of realization of the living. This historical process is what is usually called biological or philogenic evolution. In this history, and according to what I have said above as I was talking about structural determinism, the living systems and the circumstances in which they lived changed together congruently, so that they always find themselves spontaneously in dynamic congruence with the medium in the realization of their living. Living systems are historical systems. Yet, even though living systems are historical systems in their manner of existing in a philogenic evolution, as they exist in the flow of their living in circumstances that change congruently with them, they exist in no-time in a continuously changing present.

It is their historical character what makes living systems different from robots, and not that they are molecular autopoietic systems. It is that robots are ahistorical in their origin, what makes them basically different from living systems, not only that they are not autopoietic systems. At the same time, that living systems are molecular systems makes them manipulable in the same way that any other molecular system is, if the operational coherences of their constitution as such are respected.

That we living systems are structure determined systems, is both our possibility for well being if we so desire, and our bane if we careless and irresponsible of our condition of historical beings that exist in a changing present. Let us come now to the central purpose of this article.

Sección anterior Human beings.

Sobre el artículo Presentación Versión para imprimir (en inglés) Comentarios Comparta su opinión Vea otras opiniones Lista de artículos

Sección siguiente Technology and reality.