Beyond the Finite-State Machine

The Energetic Support for Life’s Navigation through software-physicalism and spaces in-between.

Abstract

Recent analyses of unicellular locomotion describe the cytoskeleton—particularly the microtubule lattice—as a finite-state controller capable of switching between discrete patterns of behavior. While such a view elegantly captures the mechanical organization of ciliary coordination, it risks reducing the cell’s motility to a closed computational scheme. This article proposes an alternative reading: the microtubular field is not the causal reason for movement, but the energetic substrate capable of sustaining the Symbols that enact meaning within the cell’s Symboliad—the dynamic field through which organism and environment co-create directional motion expressing of what we may call agency. A unicellular or an instance of any biological (and not only) thus navigates not by computation but by externsive synchronization across energy differentials, where motion itself becomes an areal of possible closures within the microtubule-supported energetic continuum. In other words, the energy in life matter is capable of registering, through its “arc” and navigating through the environment, units and a space of cognitive relevancy to it. This space is situated neither exclusively inside the organism, nor totally outside. Through this paper I explain how that happens as proposed through the Symbols Framework. An encoding of affordances that represents an enactment of a relative phases space which forms and advances by the mechanism of those units as devised: through nothing, to something, and in-between. This keeps the finite and state-machines at bay, and thus explaining life-matter’s openness, solution-solving, agency in the form of ever creating potential of those truth-for-now units. More of that, this openness, in the relative space may well account for the teleological drive in the sense of diffusion generativity of a history-laden areal; and also propose the notion of biological hysteresis through the dichotomy: a function is not an actual biological function but a history space yet to unfold within a generativity possibility through the instance’s and niche’s relative space in-between.