A Proposed Evolutionary Model

Ladies and gentlemen, I hope you will bear with me if I give an informal talk this evening, because I would like to compress four different things into as s{lort a time as possible. In the first place, I would like to point out why it is we may be impelled to regard some systems as though there were elements in them that made decisions, because I so believe that if, and only if, we do this can we call them self-organizing systems. Second, I would like to outline very briefly indeed, a general application of the sort of model we get, if we do look at systems just like this. Third, I would like to go into a more detailed model, though not in detail, and here you must pardon me completely, please, because I am not going to put the arithmetic of it on the board, and I hope you will take it that I can add numbers together, though in fact I cannot; my equations always make something different, but it works. Finally, I should like to have the presumption to make a few odd comments intended to tie together some loose ends and to establish the community of the subject. I don't hope to do very much here, but I think there are one or two things which could be said in the light of models of this kind, which tend to unify the different approaches which we have heard about today, and no doubt willhear about in the next day. The first issue then, is the question: why · do we think about systems as though they contain decision-making elements? Now,. we are self-organizing systems and we wander around in a world which is fullof wonderful black boxes, Dr. Ashby's black boxes. Some of them are turtles; some are turtledoves; some are mocking birds; soine of them go "Poop!" and some go "Pop!"; some are computers; this sort of thing. Now these things we tend to categorize in odd ways.