Excerpt: Being grateful to von Glasersfeld for having pointed out to me what I now accept, I have no desire to attack radical constructivism. There are, however, three ways in which I find it seriously, even radically, deficient, and I want in this chapter to set them out in the hope that my doing so will be some use where I, and apparently von Glasersfeld, care most about usefulness, in education. These deficiencies are a lack of due emphasis on the construction of the self, whether over against the world or as a part of it, the denial of the possibility of knowledge of the world, and von Glasersfeld’s ignoring of the massive social assistance in one’s construction of one’s notion of the world. The latter two of these deficiencies have considerable importance for education, and that is my reason for airing my criticisms in this place.

This paper proposes a new concept to use Artificial Life approach to construct intelligence as adaptive behavior based on the neuron-like computational elements. In the paper we outline a computational model for the simulation of adaptive behavior. Examples are given to demonstrate the computational model for creating simple behaviors.

This paper provides an explicit characterization of a minimal living system in terms of a self-producing dynamical organization or autopoiesis.

Conditions are described under which vesicles formed by caprylic acid and oleic acid in water are able to undergo autopoietic self-reproduction-namely an increase of their population number due to a reaction which takes place within the spherical boundary of tile vesicles themselves. This is achieved by letting a certain amount of the neat water-insoluble caprylic or oleic anhydride hydrolyze at alkaline pH: the initial increase of the concentration of the released acid/carboxylate is extremely slow (several days to reach the conditions for spontaneous vesicle formation), but afterwards, the presence of vesicles brings about a rapid second phase leading to more and more vesicles being formed in an overall autocatalytic process. The catalytic power of the caprylic acid and oleic acid vesicles toward the hydrolysis of the corresponding anhydride is documented in a set of independent experiments. In these experiments, the hydrolysis was carried out in the presence of vesicles at a pH corresponding approximately to the pK of the acid in the vesicles. The process of autopoietic self-reproduction of caprylic acid and oleic acid vesicles is studied as a function of temperature: by increasing temperature (up to 70 degrees C), the exponential time progress of vesicle formation tends to become steeper while the long initial slow phase is significantly shortened. The caprylic acid and oleic acid vesicles are characterized by electron microscopy and by determining their internal volume. The question whether and to what extent these vesicles form a classic chemical equilibrium system-in which namely the free surfactant is in equilibrium with the aggregates-is also investigated.

Key words: replicating micelles, unilamellar vesicles, reactivity control, reverse micelles, ester hydrolysis, membranes, phosphatidylcholine, evolution, mechanism, catalysis.