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question:whether-representation-can-serve-as-a-foundational-principle-or-whether-it-is-itself-founded-on-the-autonomous-organization-that-makes-representation-possible-at-all

Whether representation can serve as a foundational principle, or whether it is itself founded on the autonomous organization that makes representation possible at all.

Final open question of the discussion, left genuinely unresolved.

Source paper

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Open questions about time and self-reference in living systems

(2026) · Samson Abramsky · Wolfgang Banzhaf · Leo S. D. Caves · Michael Levin +4

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Papers (1)

paper

Open questions about time and self-reference in living systems
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Claims (2)

claim

Representation as explanatory strategy and autonomy as constitutive process generate an apparent contradiction that may not need to be dissolved but confronted, opening a wider domain of understanding.
gates
Final unresolved theoretical tension the paper leaves open regarding whether representation is foundational or founded on autonomy.
Representation may be a fundamental principle of living systems, but it is difficult to generalize formally because it appears to vanish at the molecular level.
associated_with
Central open theoretical tension raised in the discussion.

Related by similarity (8)

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Entities in the same semantic neighborhood but without a typed relation to this one — candidates for new edges or unrecognized duplicates.

What we call a representation is not a correspondence given an external state of affairs, but a consistency with a system's own ongoing maintenance of identity.quote0.799
Varela quote grounding the paper's final tension between representation and autonomy.
Even if a case successfully meets all three criteria, this does not necessarily indicate that the corresponding sequence of representations is conscious. Rather, it suggests the observation of a potential 'consciousness' phenomenon within these representations — nothing more.quote0.764
Load-bearing epistemic caution the author places on the entire analytical framework.
The discovery of perfect abstract equality representations that cannot be decomposed into entity representations is a foundational result informing our understanding of how symbolic and connectionist architectures coexistclaim0.755
Concluding claim about theoretical significance of the hierarchical equality finding.
Representational abstraction of truth may emerge more clearly with model scaleclaim0.754
Interpretation of weaker PCA separation and lower ASR in smaller models
what is the precise characterization of the perceptual representational format in which information exists as a specific, sustained, globally constitutive structure?question0.754
Open theoretical problem CIMC acknowledges: precisely characterizing the representational format of perception
The material implementation and back-story of a given system are not sufficient information to reliably place it into a category of machine vs. living being.claim0.753
Core ontological claim: composition and origin story are contingent, not essential, classifiers
Representationalismconcept0.752
Stance that sensory experience is mediated through internal models of the world; one of the paper's guiding philosophical stances.
Society must be described in terms of its intrinsic spatiality. Space must be described in terms of its intrinsic sociality.quote0.751
Key statement from Hillier and Hanson that encapsulates the inseparability of social function and spatial structure.