Processes and Events

Systems, appropriately defined, are composed of processes and an abstract concept of process will need to decompose them in terms of interactions, or events. That is, when systems are interacting, those interactions can be expressed as patterns of events. When the systems are simple enough, for example an electron interacting with a proton, the possible resulting states from given initial states are completely determined by the standard model. At this level of organization, there is no adapting, it us just physics, but as soon as you put together even relatively small numbers of particular atoms, all of the elements are present for self-organizing adaptive systems to arise.

There may be living organisms and intelligent beings that emerge from a different substrate, but the one example we have is based on carbon chemistry at a specific range of temperatures. Before living systems emerged on Earth some four billion years ago, the earth was a bit hotter and more active, but it would have had a range of environments and mixing between them driven by physical processes. At the level of chemistry, it has been shown that most of the molecular building blocks of life, the amino acids, the bases in DNA, RNA and much much more are spontaneously generated from the physical conditions that were likely to be present. We can easily imagine that during this time that any simple pattern that might occur, probably did, and the more likely patterns would occur many times.

Now we have the conditions for adaptive systems, but the purpose of this essay is to define the elements of the universe in which this adapting occurs. We have just shown that living systems that we know of as there ground the physical processes of organic chemistry, which in modern practice is deeply grounded in quantum physics. That is to say that the interacting elements of cellular processes and all the way up through any multi-level adaptive systems, interact through quantum events and transitions. This has profound implications our understanding the operating principles underlying adaptive systems. A completely reductive approach will fail because of the way quantum state might be spread across levels of the organism. At this point we will just note that there is something fundamental at the physical level in the boson/fermion distinctions. The bosons represent fields of one of the fundamental forces in the standard model. If there is a graviton, it is the boson for the gravity force, and if not gravity is just geometry. Fermions make up the stuff of the universe, bosons represent the forces, or alternatively: energy and relationship.

In this context, we will identify stuff, or fermions and groupings of fermions (atoms, molecules, Bose-Eienstein condensates, orgamisms, peopel) are all processes. Using Pierce' categories, it the category of firstness we have the firstness of a process in itself. In the full expansion of categories in a living and conceptualizing human being, like all autopoeitic systems is both the subject and the object of sign processes (semiotics). Even the simplest systems, say a single molecule or even a single proton, identified with a quantum state can be viewed in terms of all its potential interactions. As soon as you consider the potential of change, you are transitioning to secondness, a proton and an election interacting in a vaccume or a DNA molecule within an organism or all actualities.

When a process, organized autopoeitically or potentially any multi-level adaptive system, is able to enact a true thirdness where there is a level that can be said to be doing sign processing. There are some rule based processes that can enact adaptive and even intelligent responses to change (events) relevant to the entity's continuation (survival) as a network of processes.  For this essay, we want to conclude with the idea of process as subject. Subject only to a potential other in the category of firstness, but implicitely related to all potential events of the field of firstness implied by a given process. Subject also to the signals of other objects, flows of energy within and between the subjects and objects. We stop short of the discussion of thirdness in order to highlight the first two levels, experience (phenomenology) and secondness (relatedness, actuality).