iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Tom Gaul @tomgaul.bsky.social · 06/09/2025

My first research project has finally been published! I evolved and analysed agents in a referential communication task and used this to argue for a formalism that captures an agent's perspective in its own terms better than typical verb-based descriptions. doi.org/10.1162/artl...

doi.org

Cognitive Distinctions as a Language for Cognitive Science: Comparing Methods of Description in a Model of Referential Communication

Abstract. An analysis of the language we use in scientific practice is critical to developing more rigorous and sound methodologies. This article argues that how certain methods of description are com...

190

Tom Gaul @tomgaul.bsky.social · 13/08/2025

I would like to thank my advisor Dr. Beer, the other committee members (Dr. Luis Favela, @edizquierdo.bsky.social), and @cmcshaff.bsky.social for helping me throughout this project and in my research career.

110

Tom Gaul @tomgaul.bsky.social · 13/08/2025

This spring I completed my senior honors thesis in Cognitive Science at IU! I extended Randall Beer's formalization of autopoiesis in the Game of Life to a continuous space limit called RealLife. It is available here: tgaul.gitlab.io/publications....

Author: Thomas M. Gaul

Title: Biological Organisation and Viability: A Theory of Autopoiesis in Cellular and Euclidean Automata

Abstract: Increasingly, biologists are emphasising the cell as the most fundamental unit of life, and importantly, a view of the cell as an emergent, dynamic object irreducible to its molecular composition — “greater than the sum of its parts.” But what makes a cell itself living? Most answers to this question are unsatisfactory: lists of properties or behaviours that always have exceptions. Moreover, there is a lack of consensus that does not appear to be near resolution.
The theory of autopoiesis offers a potential solution here, providing an operational definition of the organisation of a cell, independent of what molecules compose it. Autopoietic theory allows us to answer questions about when a cell dies, and how it can behave. However, for it to realise this utility, rigorous theories need to be developed for specific models of emergent individuals. Beer (2020b) has previously used the Game of Life cellular automaton as one such model, and developed a mathematical theory of autopoiesis that can predict the behaviour and death of an emergent individual (Beer, McShaffrey, & Gaul, 2024).
This thesis extends and reformulates this work to a broader class of cellular automata, called Larger than Life (LtL) (Evans, 1996). I then further extend the LtL theory to a Euclidean automata, called RealLife (Pivato, 2007), and provide evidence of the convergence of autopoiesis in LtL to RealLife. I also introduce a method for deriving automata rules from the organisation of an individual.
Finally, I discuss the implications autopoietic theory has for our understanding of life and cognition, including a reevaluation of the relation between autopoiesis and the enactive approach to cognition (Di Paolo, 2005; Varela et al., 2017).

180