Society · Coordination

ChimericalComputation#cedf

Imperfectly aligned, overlapping work packs more functions into the same parts

Mechanism

Natural computation rarely does one task per component. Doing more of one thing means doing slightly less of another, and the resulting work is entangled. The apoptosis signal channel carries only about 0.92 bits, so not every cell obeys the instruction to self-destruct. This also damps over-reaction to unreliable signals and prevents a whole tissue region dying at once, so cell and cell population are optimised together. Moonlighting and disordered proteins serve several pathways in the same way. Partial non-compliance with instructions is therefore overlapping work at several levels, not only inefficiency, and the reliability lost on each path is recovered through MultiPathReliability. The friction can hold options, as in RejectionCostOptionality.

Invariants

  • Components serve more than one level or task at once
  • Instructions are executed only in part, by design

Failure modes

  • Enforcing a clean division of labour and losing the extra functions the overlap carried
  • Treating ignored instructions as pure inefficiency without asking what else is being computed
  • Treating the gene or individual as the only level of selection

Where this came from

Builds on

Identity

The name is the hash of the definition. Change a word and it becomes a different pattern.

Sema ID
sema:ChimericalComputation#mh:SHA-256:cedfdeac856dc1d2eb0a2240ea7798dd119927827580865eaf58798838ed75d8
Reference
ChimericalComputation#cedf
Ring
2
Tier
3