self-modifying systems

Compiled with AI assistance and selectively reviewed. Please consult the cited passages; the books remain the authoritative source. About this companion

Editorial synthesis · provisional

Definition

Self-modifying systems, in RB2’s account of Kampis, change their own organization through development, learning and environmental interaction, thereby altering the possibilities relevant to later activity. They do more than traverse a fixed state space under invariant rules. The proposed entry preserves that organizational claim without identifying all ordinary state change with self-modification or guaranteeing the success of every newly available possibility.

Explanation

Kampis’s contrast concerns the space of possibilities and the organization that makes transitions available. A changing value within an unchanged predefined landscape is therefore insufficient for the stronger sense. The entry keeps this contrast operational rather than treating novelty as a magical exemption from physical constraint or causal explanation.

RB2 names learning, development, niche construction, immune and neural plasticity and technical mediation as ways future relevance can change. The examples are an attributed conceptual account, not certification that every instance exhibits the same mechanism or yields an adaptive improvement. Altered possibilities can remain vulnerable to failure.

The passage places self-modification beside Rosen’s organizational analysis while resisting a sterile all-or-nothing simulation debate. Anticipation can reshape the horizon from which future options are drawn rather than merely choose among a fixed menu. This is distinct from proving every living system consciously rewrites rules or can achieve whatever it imagines.

Scope and attribution

Retain Kampis attribution and the fixed-space contrast without unlimited novelty claims.

AB — The Actual Book

Source-verified occurrence; see the printed-page references below.

Occurrence locators: Notes: 242.

RB1 — The Real Book, Volume I: The Possible Is Real

Source-verified occurrence; see the printed-page references below.

Occurrence locators: 250.

RB2 — The Real Book, Volume II: Becoming Is Being

Kampis’s changing possibility-space account is distinct from mere trajectory change and absolute simulation claims.

Occurrence locators: 108, 121, 132, 133.

Background used in the editorial explanation

Kampis’s organizational self-modification is distinguished from generic change; the cultural application alters selection environments.