Those processes that exist and are observable are more likely to have contributed
to the survival of the greater systems within which the process exists
than are less adaptable processes that did not contribute as much. A process may
contribute to its own survival, or it may contribute to the survival of similar or
identical processes in other systems, when contributing to the survival of others
increases the chance for similar processes to appear in future systems. For example,
someone who can communicate the nature of a vaccine for a childhood
disease that can save the lives of millions of children may not increase their own
chance of survival but will increase the number of communicative humans with
intellectual abilities similar in some respects to those of the vaccine’s developer.
We refer to systems that take on increasingly sophisticated and non-random
structures as they evolve as self-organizing systems. Functions may be learned
or may evolve through self-organization over time. This often occurs because increased
organization or structure itself leads to increased adaptability and survival,
although we should not make the mistake of assuming that increased complexity
necessarily implies increased survivability [Gou97]. Through learning processes,
a function may infer the characteristics and parameters of a function of interest
through supervised learning, where labeled cases are learned when inferring
a generalizing principle. The effect of learning also may be produced through
evolution, with randomly generated variations either surviving with increased or
decreased frequency over time. This has the effect of learning adaptive characteristics.
Learning communicative functions through evolutionary processes requires
the presence of a higher level layer that both produces and receives information.
In the case of bees said to be communicating through dancing, there is a process
above the dancing process (which has evolved) that allows the dancing process to
be be evolutionarily supported by increasing the survival rate of bees with dancing
(or understanding) skills.