The Role of Biological Time in Microbial Self-Organization and Experience of Environmental Alterations

A notion of biological time can be derived from distinct physiological ‘units of becoming’, by which an organism recreates itself in individual acts of experience. Using this starting point we present characteristic features of biological time in lower organisms. In these organisms the irreversibility of every act of experience can be attributed to a sequence of physiological processes of specific duration, termed “adaptive events”, in which energy converting subsystems of a cell interact with the changing environment. In this process, the subsystems pass, via an adaptive operation mode, from one adapted state to the next. In adaptive operation modes alterations of the environment are ‘interpreted’ in the light of former experiences. Thereby, the subsystems are reconstructed according to these interpretations such that the resulting adapted state potentially allows optimal performance of the organism in the future. In this regard adaptive events contain a temporal vector character in that they connect former with future events and establish the irreversible historicity of the life process, in which information pertaining to the self-preservation is transferred from one adaptive event to the next: the latter “inherits” the results of former interpretations. By appropriating it selectively, it is entering into a future in which its own interpretation is passed on to the following adaptive event. This system-theoretical line of reasoning is elaborated in detail using an example from aquatic ecology. In a generalization for higher organisms the temporal vector character of adaptive events is related to basic propositions of Whitehead’s process philosophy and to the time concept of Augustinus.

Keywords: Adaptive behavior, autopoiesis, biological time, cyanobacteria, duration, energy conversion, experience, organismic intentions, self-referential systems, self-constitution.