Metaphysics of

Genetic Architecture and

Planetary
automata based
on 1-D cellular
automata (CA). Each
rule set constitutes a
genetic code that embodies
the logic of self-replication: a
system of recursively defined geometric
objects. Each planet is generated by a
composite rule set: a CA rule is superseded by
another rule based on either local conditions or random
instantiation. The density of each sphere displayed here is the result of a mere
300 generations, which is exceedingly small in relation to the potentially infinite
number of generations that each planet can embody. (CA programming and
modelling by Kevin Sipes.)

38
Karl Chu ruminates on the far-reaching sapiens on Earth. At the same time, depending on how
impact that the convergence of computation humankind navigates into the universe of possible worlds
and biogenetics will have on the unfolding that are about to be siphoned through computation, it could
history of man and nature. Could the world once again bring forth a poetic re-enchantment of the world,
be ‘moving into the so-called Post-Human one that resonates with all the attributes of a premodern era
derived, in this instance, from the intersection of the
Era, which will bring forth a new kind of seemingly irreconcilable domains of logos and mythos.
biomachinic mutation of organic and Organically interconnected to form a new plane of
inorganic substances’? How can architects immanence that is digital, computation is the modern
reconfigure the practice of their discipline in equivalent of a global alchemical system destined to transform
order to meet the demands of this the world into the sphere of hyper-intelligent beings.
computational and biogenetic revolution? The power of computation is already evident: in the last
70 years since the inception of the Universal Turing
Machine,3 it has ushered in the Information Revolution by
‘All is algorithm!’ giving rise to one of the most significant and now
Gregory Chaitin1 indispensable phenomena in the history of communication:
the Internet or what could also be characterised as the
With the dissolution of the last utopian project of Man in the universe of the Adjacent Possible. Stuart Kauffman defines
name of Communism, the great spectre that once haunted the Adjacent Possible as the expansion of networks of
Europe and the rest of the world has all but vanished, leaving reaction graphs within an interactive system into
in its wake an ideological vacuum that is now being filled by neighbourhood domains of connectivity which until then
the tentacles of globalisation with its ecumenical ambition. As remain in a state of pure potentiality. He suggests that: ‘The
humanity has become mesmerised by the triumphant spell of Universe has not explored all possible kinds of people, legal
capitalism, what remains less apparent in the aftermath of systems, economies or other complex systems,’ and that
this dissolution is that the world is moving incipiently ‘autonomous Agents tend to arrange work and coordination
towards a threshold that is far more radical and fantastic than so that they are expanding into the Adjacent Possible as fast
any utopic vision since the dawn of the Enlightenment. Once as they can get away with it’.4
again, the world is witnessing the rumblings of a Promethean Like every phase transition, the Internet marks a new
fire that is destined to irrupt into the universe of humanity, world order by reconfiguring the planet with a virtual, albeit
calling into question the nature and function of life–world an interactive, matrix that is becoming increasingly spatial,
relations as they so far have existed. These rumblings, intelligent and autonomous: a global self-synthesising organ
stemming in large measure from the convergence of bustling with neural intelligence feasibly detectable from
computation and biogenetics in the latter part of the 20th every corner of the Milky Way and beyond. The implications
century, have already begun to invoke gravid visions of the for architecture are most pronounced at the level of
unthinkable: the unmasking of the primordial veil of reality. construction of possible worlds. The thesis this paper
The evolution of life and intelligence on Earth has finally advances is that architecture is becoming increasingly
reached the point where it is now deemed possible to dependent on genetic computation: the generative
engender something almost out of nothing. In principle, a construction and the mutual coexistence of possible worlds
universe of possible worlds based on generative principles within the computable domain of modal space.
inherent within nature and the physical universe is Yet, what is the nature of computation that is destined to
considered to be within the realm of the computable once change the world, including architecture? No instrumental
quantum computing systems become a reality.2 For the first concept or logic of implementation since the invention of the
time, humankind is finally in possession of the power to wheel has fostered so much enthusiasm and promise as
change and transform the genetic constitution of biological computation. Beyond the normative conception of computing
species, which, without a doubt, has profound implications machines as mere instruments for calculation, fabrication and
for the future of life on Earth. By bringing into the foreground communication, it is important to recognise the nature of the
the hidden reservoir of life in all its potential manifestations underlying ambitions of computation and its relation to
through the manipulation of the genetic code, the unmasking architecture. As controversial and provocative as it may seem,
or the transgression of what could be considered the first the underlying ambitions of computation are already
principle of prohibition – the taking into possession of what apparent: the embodiment of artificial life and intelligence
was once presumed to be the power of God to create life – systems either through abstract machines or through
may lead to conditions that are so precarious and treacherous biomachinic mutation of organic and inorganic substances
as to even threaten the future viability of the species Homo and, most significantly, the subsequent sublimation of

39
physical and actual worlds into higher forms of organic a very deep bottom, in most instances – an immaterial source
intelligence by extending into the computable domain of and explanation that is information-theoretic in origin.6 The
possible worlds. At the most prosaic level, however, fact that computation is a physical process further stipulates
computation, like natural languages, deals with information the existence of a self-consistent logical loop: the laws of
in its most general form. Computation functions as physics define the allowed mechanical operations and the
manipulator of integers, graphs, programs and many other possible activities of a Universal Turing Machine, which in
kinds of entities. But in reality, computation only manipulates turn determine which mathematical operations are
strings of symbols that represent the objects. computable and define the nature of solvable mathematics. In
other words, the laws of physics generate the very
mathematics that makes those laws computable. The
It is not surprising that the discovery of this inextricable linkage between computation
and physics has led to the awareness that physical processes
origin of computation lies in are in fact forms of computation, and nowhere is this
an attempt to embody understanding made more explicit than in Stephen Wolfram’s
formulation of the Principle of Computational Equivalence.
instrumental reason in an Wolfram remarks: ‘All processes, whether they are produced
by human effort or occur spontaneously in nature, can be
abstract machine with the viewed as computations.’7
attendant drive to encode the This proposition reflects a fundamental shift in the way we
think about the nature of the physical universe; it is nothing
logic of life and the world short of a paradigm shift, which would not have been
conceivable without an underlying thesis that enables the
around us in all its construction of such a world view: the Church–Turing Thesis,
manifestations. as formulated by Alfonso Church and Alan Turing in the early
part of the 20th century. According to Turing: ‘Every “function
which would naturally be regarded as computable” can be
It should also be pointed out that, according to the late computed by the Universal Turing Machine.’8
Richard Feynman, computing systems could be constructed at Although the absolute veracity of the thesis cannot be
the atomic scale: swarms of nanobots, each functioning in decided by logical means, all attempts to give an exact analysis
accordance to a simple set of rules, could be made to infiltrate of the intuitive notion of an effectively calculable function
into host organisms or environments including the human have turned out to be equivalent. Each analysis offered has
body. In its simplest form, computation is a system that proven to pick out the same class of functions, namely those
processes information through a discrete sequence of steps by that are computable by the Turing machine.
taking the results of its preceding stage and transforming it to Parallel to the development of computation is the discovery
the next stage in accordance with a recursive function. Such of the DNA code in the early part of the 20th century, the
an iterative procedure based on recursion has proved to be significance of which has only begun to be realised with the
astonishingly powerful and is classified as belonging to a class completion of the Human Genome Project. Finally, with the
of machines having universal properties. convergence of computation and biogenetics, the world is now
It is not surprising that the origin of computation lies in an moving into the so-called Post-Human Era, which will bring
attempt to embody instrumental reason in an abstract forth a new kind of biomachinic mutation of organic and
machine with the attendant drive to encode the logic of life inorganic substances. Information is the currency that drives
and the world around us in all its manifestations. The quest all these developments, and nowhere is this more apparent
for a Universal Language5 that could encapsulate all the than in the words uttered by Craig Venter, the ex-CEO of
attributes and functions necessary to inscribe the form and Celera Corporation which completed the human genome
structure of all computable worlds is becoming one of the sequence: ‘The goal is to engineer a new species from scratch.’9
most persistent endeavours in the short history of Notwithstanding theological implications, this statement
computation. Since computation is about information- bluntly announces the unadulterated ambition of the
processing at the most fundamental level, John Wheeler, the biogenetic revolution. It is only a matter of time before the
prominent American scientist influential to a whole world will witness biomachinic mutation of species
generation of physicists in the latter half of the 20th century, proliferating into every facet of what so far has been the
initiated an information-theoretic conception of the world by cultural landscape of humanity. Architects take note: this is
stipulating that every item in the universe has at bottom – at the beginning of the demise, if not the displacement, of the

40
This image
is a symbolic
representation of
the physical universe
in terms of bits by John
Wheeler. Reprinted from John
Wheeler, ‘Information, physics,
quantum: the search for links’, in Zurek
Wojciech (ed), Complexity, Entropy and the
Physics of Information (Sante Fe Institute Studies in the
Sciences of Complexity Proceedings), Addison-Wesley Publishing
Company (Reading, MA), 1989.

41
reign of anthropology, which has always subsumed its embeddedness within the general economy of forces,
architecture. Architecture, especially from the standpoint of relationships and the global economy. The morphodynamical
its mythical inception, has always been a subset of approach, which has spurred two different methodological
anthropology: the expulsion of Minotaur, the beast, by orientations in dealing with programmatic issues, is the more
entrapping it in the labyrinth built by Daedalus, the mythical dominant of the two at the moment. The morphogenetic
architect at Knossos. The potential emancipation of system is still more or less in its embryonic stage, even
architecture from anthropology is already enabling us to though it is by far the more fundamental and necessary since
think for the first time of a new kind of xenoarchitecture with it deals with the construction of objects directly.
its own autonomy and will to being. In order to break through Having identified some of the salient features that are
the barrier of complacency and self-imposed ignorance on the integral to dominant trends within contemporary
part of the discipline, what is needed is a radicalisation of the architecture, as well as the nuanced relations that each of
prevailing paradigm of architecture, beyond retroactive these trends have with regard to the phenomenon of
manifestos, by developing a new concept of architecture that globalisation, which is increasingly augmented and driven by
is adequate to the demands imposed by computation and the the gift of Promethean fire that is now saturating the cultural
biogenetic revolution. universe of humanity with all forms of transgenic mutation,
we are now in a position to articulate a more comprehensive
theory of architecture, one that is adequate to the demands
Within the contemporary imposed by the convergence of computation and biogenetics
in the so-called Post-Human Era: a monadology of genetic
landscape of architectural architecture that deals with the construction of possible
discourse there are two worlds. As we now approach what Ray Kurzweil refers to as
the Singularity,10 the myth of matter, which underlies most
divergent trends with theoretical and practical discussions of architecture, is about
to be displaced by the myth of information. Contrary to Mies
theoretical motivations: the van der Rohe’s oft-quoted remark that architecture is the art
morphodynamical and the of putting two bricks together, the emerging conception is
that architecture is the art of putting two bits together, at
morphogenetic systems’ least bits that are programmed to self-replicate, self-organise
and self-synthesise into evermore new constellations of
approaches to the design and emergent relations and ensembles.
construction of buildings. The use of the term ‘monadology’ is based on the fact that
genetic architecture is an extension and transformation of
some of the propositions, especially those that define
Even though architects have incorporated computing attributes and properties of relationships among monads,
systems in the design and construction of buildings and contained in Gottfried W Leibniz’s Monadology (1714),11 albeit
environments, the phase of transmodernity that we are now without its theogony, into an architectural theory of world-
in is perhaps best characterised by the use of computation making. Monadology is one of the earliest attempts in
still operating under the vestiges of the old paradigm. In other sketching out a system of principles that generalises the
words, architecture has still yet to incorporate the nature of the world from an abstract point of view; it shares
architecture of computation into the computation of conceptual properties that are now deemed to be fundamental
architecture. Within the contemporary landscape of to the science and philosophy of computation. Even though
architectural discourse there are two divergent trends with Leibniz was impeded by the lack of conceptual and technical
theoretical motivations: the morphodynamical and the resources at the time,12 his ideas nonetheless paved the way
morphogenetic systems’ approaches to the design and for the subsequent development of computation and,
construction of buildings. These two systems are reminiscent according to Gregory Chaitin, Algorithmic Information
of a strikingly similar problem that exists in modern biology, Theory13 in the 20th century.
which is still attempting to synthesise the differences that Leibniz’s Monadology is arguably the earliest endeavour to
exist between molecular biology, on the one hand, and propose what is now known as an open-source architecture
developmental biology on the other. What is needed in based on the principles of philosophical genetics: the principle
architecture also is a similar synthesis of the two. After more of generative condensation, the principle of combinatorial
than half a century of engagement with the avant-garde, the expansion, and the principle of the conservation of
practice of architecture has become increasingly conscious of information. Monadology is a metaphysical treatise; Leibniz

42
Each planet is
a representation
of an incomplete
totality: an abstraction
of the concept of possible
worlds based on 1-D CA. At the
deepest level, CA is one of the simplest
forms of generative engine and there are a total
of 256 rules in 1-D CA, which together constitute a computational
monad. Each monad therefore defines the virtual ontology of the set of
possible worlds contained within a system of rules. Each sphere represents a
proto-architectural universe that is potentially infinite in terms of variability
and density with regard to its composition. (CA programming and modelling
by Kevin Sipes.)

43
The underlying
thesis suggested
by these planetary
automata is that
architecture is the
construction of possible worlds
generated by the universe of
computational monads. Each monad
encapsulates an internal principle that is
generative, and each generative system transmits and
propagates hereditary information. Each monad is at once a self-
replicating and self-organising system capable of constituting itself into a
cohesive whole or a possible world: in other words, a monadology of genetic
architecture. (CA programming by Chris Sandes; modelling by Christian Lange.)

44
defines each monad as a metaphysical point, an irreducible could manufacture itself: a robot that self-replicates and self-
concept of an atomic entity that is endowed with an constructs copies of itself,14 a notion that lies at the heart of
immaterial substance. Contrary to Leibniz and without the biology: the essence of self-reproduction is organisation – the
reference to God as the supreme creator of monads, a ability of a system to contain a complete description of itself
computational theory of monadology would instead qualify and use that information to create new copies.
each monad as one BIT of information at the most irreducible The von Neumann architecture for a self-replicating system
level, and by extension a unit of a self-replicating system. It is is the ancestral and archetypical proposal, which consisted of
based on this conception of a monad as a minimal unit of a two central elements: a Universal Computer and a Universal
self-replicating system that a monadology of genetic Constructor. The Universal Computer contains a program that
architecture is developed here. directs the behaviour of the Universal Constructor, which, in
Historically, genetic architecture can be seen as an turn, is used to manufacture both another Universal
extension and transformation of utopic ideas implicit within Computer and a Universal Constructor. Once finished, the
the avant-garde to create new worlds by drawing on new newly manufactured Universal Computer was programmed by
sciences and technologies. Genetics is a term coined by copying the program contained in the original Universal
William Bateson in 1905 to encompass the study of heredity, Computer, and program execution would then begin again.
and ‘gene’ was introduced around the same time by the The von Neumann architecture is, therefore, a precursor to
Danish botanist Wilhelm Johannsen, to account for the units the architecture of a genetic system. 4
within sex cells that determine the hereditary characteristics.
Notes
The meanings of both terms, ‘genetics’ and ‘gene’, are
1 Gregory Chaitin, Leibniz, Information, Math and Physics,
sufficiently abstract and general to be used as concepts that http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/CDMTCS/chaitin/kirchberg.pdf), 2003, p 9.
have logical implications for architecture without being 2 David Deutsch, ‘Quantum theory, the Church–Turing principle and the
anchored too explicitly to biology. Implicit within the concept Universal Quantum Computer’, in Proceedings of the Royal Society of London
A 400, 1985, p 3.
of genetics is the idea of the replication of heritable units 3 Alan Turing, ‘On Computable Numbers with an Application to the
based on some rule inherent within the genetic code, and Entscheidungsproblem’, Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, Ser
embedded within the mechanism for replication is a 2, Vol 42, 1936. Alan Turing developed the Universal Turing Machine, an
generative function: the self-referential logic of recursion. abstract machine in the logical sense of the term, in response to David
Hilbert’s call for the resolution of the decision problem, or
Recursion is a function or rule that repeatedly calls itself or its Entscheidungsproblem, in mathematics.
preceding stage by applying the same rule successively, 4 Stuart Kauffman, Investigations, Oxford University Press (New York), 2000,
thereby generating a self-referential propagation of a pp 142–4. Kauffman’s concept of the Adjacent Possible was applied in the
context of his investigations into the origin of life based on autocatalytic
sequence or a series of transformations. It is this logic,
systems, which are derived from random interactions of nodes within Boolean
encoded within an internal principle, that constitutes the networks. See http://www.paulagordon.com/shows/kauffman/.
autonomy of the generative that lies at the heart of 5 Paolo Rossi, Logic and the Art of Memory: The Quest for a Universal
computation. Language, University of Chicago Press (Chicago, IL), 2000, pp 145–94.
6 John Wheeler, ‘Information, physics, quantum: the search for links’, in Zurek
Even though genetic is a term derived from biology, it is
Wojciech (ed), Complexity, Entropy and the Physics of Information (Santa Fe
used here as a generic concept based on the interconnected Institute Studies in the Sciences of Complexity Proceedings), Vol VIII, Addison-
logic of recursion and self-replication whose philosophical Wesley (Reading, MA), 1989, p 5.
underpinnings go far beyond the confines of molecular 7 Stephen Wolfram, A New Kind of Science, Wolfram Research (Champaign,
IL), 2002, p 41.
biology. It should therefore be noted that genetic architecture
8 Alan Turing, op cit. Note: Apart from the analyses defined in terms of
is neither a representation of biology nor a form of lambda-definability and recursiveness by A Church, there are analyses in
biomimesis; instead, its theoretical origins, insofar as genetic terms of register machines by JP Shepherdson and HE Sturgis, EL Post’s
architecture is concerned, can be traced to John von canonical and normal systems, combinatory definability by M Schönfinkel and
HB Curry, Markov algorithms and Gödel’s notion of reckonability.
Neumann’s invention of the cellular automaton and his ‘von 9 Craig Venter, ‘Supermicrobe Man’, Wired, No 10, 12 December 2002, p 191.
Neumann architecture’ for self-replicating systems. From the 10 Ray Kurzweil, ‘The Singularity’, in John Brockman, The New Humanists:
early stages of the development of modern computing Science at the Edge, Barnes & Noble (New York), 2003, pp 215–32.
systems, von Neumann was proposing the idea of self- 11 GW Leibniz and Nicholas Rescher, GW Leibniz’s Monadology: An Edition for
Students, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1991.
replication. Even though he participated in discussions 12 Martin Davis, The Universal Computer: The Road From Leibniz to Turing,
leading to the development of the first electronic computer WW Norton & Company (New York), 2000, pp 180–7.
ever built – the ENIAC – von Neumann eventually came up 13 Chaitlin, op cit.
14 William Poundstone, The Recursive Universe: Cosmic Complexity and the
with what is now known as the von Neumann architecture –
Limits of Scientific Knowledge, Contemporary Books, Inc (Canada), 1985. See
the prototype for modern computing systems with its stored also:
memory program. This addressed the idea of a machine that http://www.zyvex.com/nanotech/selfRepJBIS.html#vonNeumannArchitecture.

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