Edinburgh Napier University

  Biological and social systems are considered as a flux of interacting components that transiently participate in interactions with other system components as part of the system. This suggests that any simulated system undergoing open ended evolution should be considered in the context of a variable environment that provides elements for the system and acts as a sink for discarded elements of the system. It is argued that any such system can be seen as a computational system that tries to predict its own environment. Furthermore it is argued that such systems must have an infinite representation equivalent of Turing machines. Consequently the level of infiniteness of such systems must be equal to the infiniteness of the category of pre-orders (i.e. the category that is a smallest representation of Turing machines). Finally, the reconciliation of the practical finiteness and principial infiniteness of these systems and implications of the approach taken here are discussed