Syntactic autonomy

The study of adapting and evolving autonomous agents should be based on a complex systems-theoretic framework which requires both self-organizing and symbolic dimensions. An inclusive framework based on the notions of semiotics and situated action is advanced to build models capable of representing, as well as evolving in their environments. Such undertaking is pursued by discussing the ways in which symbol and self-organization are irreducibly intertwined in evolutionary systems. This way, we re-think the notion of autonomy of evolving systems, and show that evolutionary systems are characterized by a particular type of syntactic autonomy. Recent developments in emergent computation in cellular automata are discussed as examples of the emergence of syntactic autonomy in computational environments. New results emphasizing this syntactic autonomy in cellular automata are presented.