Adjacent Possible

Stuart Kauffman concept. I can begin to imagine making models of how the universe gets more complex, but at the same time I'm hamstrung... How do we get started on something where we could talk about the future of a biosphere? There is a chance that there are general laws. I've thought about four of them. One of them says that autonomous agents have to live the most complex game (complex system) that they can. The second has to do with the construction of EcoSystems. The third has to do with Per Bak's Self Organized criticality in ecosystems. And the fourth concerns the idea of the Adjacent Possible. It just may be the case that biospheres on average keep expanding into the adjacent possible. By doing so they increase the Diversity of what can happen next. It may be that biospheres, as a secular trend, maximize the rate of exploration of the adjacent possible. If they did it too fast, they would destroy their own internal organization, so there may be internal gating mechanisms. This is why I call this an average secular trend, since they explore the Adjacent Possible as fast as they can get away with it. There's a lot of neat science to be done to unpack that, and I'm thinking about it. http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/kauffman03/kauffman_index.html

http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2010/02/can_a_changing_adjacent_possib.html