The bead game is underdevelopment, however part of the function of the game comes from clicking the forward and back links above and from game players sending in Remarks.

Indexing

Ontogeny of Information

There is new language available that helps one talk about the "ontogeny of information" (see "The Ontogeny of Information, by Susan Oyama, 2000.) The core notion is that measurement is made by biological systems. The machinery for making measurement is already present in physical systems where change in internal states is facilitated by memory and anticipation. Memory and anticipation is secondary to a perceptual measurement (Kugler, private communication).

"Structural coupling" is a term used by the two Chilean neurobiologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela (see "The Tree of Knowledge" 1987). This structural coupling forms a "closed" system that involves the internal endophysics of anatomic, metabolic, and even quantum mechanical interaction. (Why not?)

The coupling is between this endophysics and the exophysics of an environment. Action and perception operate within this structural coupling. Action/perception cycles within a structural coupling are the cause of our perception, of self and of environment.

The structural coupling involves a selective memory of experience. This experience is captured into a phenotype of sorts, a phenotype of how the interaction of a living system and a structured world is revealed within the world. The ontogeny of information is an organization of fragmented experience. Experience is de-structured. The invariance of experience is made available during remembrance. The consequences of interaction are encoded into mechanics that produce states. These states are archetypes, to be substituted for the raw experience when ever possible.

Once the substitution is made the anticipatory system has a known quantity to work with. A tensor calculus can be employed as a control system on the latent relationships exposed by the Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) process.

The ontogeny of a LSI index on a complex source of data follows the same process. The implementation detail is different, of course, but the steps and stages are the same. Part of the process is algorithmic and part is not algorithmic (see Roger Penrose's work).

So how does the living system make sense of the stream of sensory experience? The answer may be simpler than we expect, and yet somehow more sophisticated. The results must be judged separately from the intricacies of the underlying algorithms and methodologies. If it can be show to work, then people will buy it.