Who or what decides what is... what are the regularities of something? Well, presumably a complex adaptive system, or as John Holland would call it, a... an adaptive agent. And that's something, some system that takes in a stream of data about itself and the rest of the world, compresses the observed regularities of those data into a... a compact, simple message... a compact message I should say, not necessarily so simple. A compact message, and then, usually in conjunction with further data from the data stream, makes out of that compact message a description or prediction of what happens in the world or a prescription for behavior of the system in the world. The results of that description, prediction or prescription of behavior in the real world then feed back to exert selection pressures on competition among these possible compressed messages. I call them schemata, John Holland would call them internal models. But whichever way you look at it, the internal model or schema has the chance of mutating or being replaced by another, so there is competition among different schemata. And the selection pressures exerted back by the real world effects on the competition cause the schema to evolve. So in biological evolution the schema would be the genotype, in the... the human scientific enterprise the schema would be a theory, in thought processes the schema would be an idea and so on and so forth. So it's a complex adaptive system really which determines... an observing complex adaptive system that determines what are the regularities and what features are treated as incidental in the description of something. The... the complex adaptive system doesn't have to be living, or even a part of a living thing, nor an aggregation of living things. It could be a computer, it could be a… a complex adaptive system on a computer. For an example, genetic algorithms, or neural nets, would be complex adaptive systems on computers. Living things would be biological evolution itself, organisms, parts of organisms like the immune system or the brain, aggregations of organisms, like a… a market composed of investors and so on and so on.
