Related papers: The World as Evolving Information
In the last few decades or so, we witness a paradigm shift in our nature studies - from a data-processing based computational approach to an information-processing based cognitive approach. The process is restricted and often misguided by…
This document has an unorthodox structure to accomplish an unorthodox goal: presenting the scaffolding for a zero-parameter Unified Theory of Life inside several dozen pages. Ideally, that length is short enough to be understood in a few…
Most research on adaptive decision-making takes a strategy-first approach, proposing a method of solving a problem and then examining whether it can be implemented in the brain and in what environments it succeeds. We present a method for…
Observations on the past provide some hints about what will happen in the future, and this can be quantified using information theory. The ``predictive information'' defined in this way has connections to measures of complexity that have…
In this paper, we make a review on the concepts of rationality across several different fields, namely in economics, psychology and evolutionary biology and behavioural ecology. We review how processes like natural selection can help us…
All natural things process and transform information. They receive environmental information as input, and transform it into appropriate output responses. Much of science is dedicated to building models of such systems -- algorithmic…
We discuss views about whether the universe can be rationally comprehended, starting with Plato, then Leibniz, and then the views of some distinguished scientists of the previous century. Based on this, we defend the thesis that…
Brain science and artificial intelligence have made great progress toward the understanding and engineering of the human mind. The progress has accelerated significantly since the turn of the century thanks to new methods for probing the…
This is a programmatic paper, marking out two directions in which the study of social media can contribute to broader problems of social science: understanding cultural evolution and understanding collective cognition. Under the first…
We review recent progress in understanding the meaning of mutual information in natural language. Let us define words in a text as strings that occur sufficiently often. In a few previous papers, we have shown that a power-law distribution…
This paper consists of two parts. In the first part, we develop a new information theory, in which it is not a coincidence that information and physical entropy share the same mathematical formula. It is an adaptation of mind to help search…
In this thesis I present a short review of ideas in quantum information theory. The first chapter contains introductory material, sketching the central ideas of probability and information theory. Quantum mechanics is presented at the level…
Order exists in the world. The intelligence process enables us to realize that order, to some extent. We provide a high level description of intelligence using simple definitions, basic building blocks, a conceptual framework and general…
Recently, computational modelling became a very important research tool that enables us to study problems that for decades evaded scientific analysis. Evolutionary systems are certainly examples of such problems: they are composed of many…
Existential rules are an expressive knowledge representation language mainly developed to query data. In the literature, they are often supposed to be in some normal form that simplifies technical developments. For instance, a common…
A fundamental question in the field of social studies of science is how research fields emerge, grow and decline over time and space. This study confronts this question here by developing an inductive analysis of emerging research fields…
Niels Bohr wrote: "There is no quantum world. There is only an abstract quantum physical description. It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how Nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about Nature." In an…
The world is passing through a major revolution called the information revolution, in which information and knowledge is becoming available to people in unprecedented amounts wherever and whenever they need it. Those societies which fail to…
We need much better understanding of information processing and computation as its primary form. Future progress of new computational devices capable of dealing with problems of big data, internet of things, semantic web, cognitive robotics…
Information theory is a statistical theory concerned with the relative state of detectors and physical systems. As a consequence, the classical framework of Shannon needs to be extended to deal with quantum detectors, possibly moving at…