Between things I started rereading the great paper by Walter Fontana and Leo Buss about artificial chemistry. I read it a long time ago, but after having read Von Foerster, Maturana, Varela, Spencer-Brown, Rosen, Cariani, Kaufman (Louis) and Kauffman (Stuart), I now see that it is a lot more profound than I thought when first reading it. It now blows my mind, to be more exact, and actually refers to more than half of the people I just mentioned.

Here a quote which resonates in very interesting ways with the authors mentioned above:

“The world of functions and the world of processes emphasize the halting problem differently. While termination is a desideratum for functions or algorithms, the opposite is typically true for processes. There one looks for conditions under which a community of processes is guaranteed never to dead-lock, as there are many situations where ongoing communication or interactivity is required. Examples include operating systems, whether in air traffic control systems, computer systems, mobile telephone networks, or…living and cognizing systems. The focus on the absence of dead-lock shifts the attention from computation to organization.”

The full reference is:

Walter Fontana, Leo W. Buss, “The barrier of objects: From dynamical systems to bounded
organizations “, in: John Casti & Anders Karlqvist, eds.,“Boundaries and Barriers”, Addison-Wesley, Reading MA, 1996, pp. 56–116.

there is an online version with extra appendices.