Syntactic Autonomy: Why There is no Autonomy without Symbols and How
  Self-Organization Might Evolve Them
  Two different types of agency are discussed based on dynamically coherent and
incoherent couplings with an environment respectively. I propose that until a
private syntax (syntactic autonomy) is discovered by dynamically coherent
agents, there are no significant or interesting types of closure or autonomy.
When syntactic autonomy is established, then, because of a process of
description-based selected self-organization, open-ended evolution is enabled.
At this stage, agents depend, in addition to dynamics, on localized, symbolic
memory, thus adding a level of dynamical incoherence to their interaction with
the environment. Furthermore, it is the appearance of syntactic autonomy which
enables much more interesting types of closures amongst agents which share the
same syntax. To investigate how we can study the emergence of syntax from
dynamical systems, experiments with cellular automata leading to emergent
computation to solve non-trivial tasks are discussed. RNA editing is also
mentioned as a process that may have been used to obtain a primordial
biological code necessary open-ended evolution.
