Related papers: Consciousness: A Direct Link with Life's Origin?
Nearly 60 years ago Weinberg suggested a criterion for particle "compositeness", which has acquired new life with the discovery of new, exotic hadrons. His idea resonates with model-based intuition. I discuss the role it plays in the…
Based on the oligomer-world hypothesis we propose an abstract model where the molecular recognition among oligomers is described in the shape space. The origin of life in the oligomer world is regarded as the establishment of a metabolic…
This paper explores the idea that information is an essential and distinctive feature of living systems. Unlike non-living systems, living systems actively acquire, process, and use information about their environments to respond to…
Neural systems show a modular and typically also a hierarchical organisation across different levels and across different species. Topology relates to function, but it is also influences dynamics as earlier studies showed its effect on…
The subjective experience of consciousness is at once familiar and yet deeply mysterious. Strategies exploring the top-down mechanisms of conscious thought within the human brain have been unable to produce a generalized explanatory theory…
Consciousness is an explicit outcome of brain activity. However, the link between consciousness and the material world remains to be explored. We applied a new logic tool, the non-identity law, to the analysis of the visual dynamics related…
Humans have the ability to report the contents of their subjective experience - we can say to each other, "I am aware of X". The decision processes that support these reports about mental contents remain poorly understood. In this article I…
Recently we presented a concise survey of the formulation of the induction and coinduction principles, and some concepts related to them, in five different fields mathematical fields, hence shedding some light on the precise relation…
Living systems are thermodynamically open but closed in their organization. In other words, even though their material components turn over constantly, a material-independent property persists, which we call organization. Moreover,…
The paper starts with the proposal that the cause of the apparent insolubility of the free-will problem are several popular but strongly metaphysical notions and hypotheses. To reduce the metaphysics, some ideas are borrowed from physics. A…
Herein we consider various concepts of entropy as measures of the complexity of phenomena and in so doing encounter a fundamental problem in physics that affects how we understand the nature of reality. In essence the difficulty has to do…
Understanding the neural mechanism underlying subjective representation has become a central endeavor in cognitive-neuroscience. In theories of conscious perception, stimulus gaining conscious access is usually considered as a discrete…
Biological organisms are composed of numerous interconnected biochemical processes. Diseases occur when normal functionality of these processes is disrupted. Thus, understanding these biochemical processes and their interrelationships is a…
The path toward the emergence of life in our biosphere involved several key events allowing for the persistence, reproduction and evolution of molecular systems. All these processes took place in a given environmental context and required…
Metabolic networks perform some of the most fundamental functions in living cells, including energy transduction and building block biosynthesis. While these are the best characterized networks in living systems, understanding their…
This thesis is a compendium of research which brings together ideas from the fields of Complex Networks and Computational Neuroscience to address two questions regarding neural systems: 1) How the activity of neurons, via synaptic changes,…
Living systems continuously transform matter and energy through the chemical processes that constitute their metabolism. The overall metabolic rate of an organism correlates positively with its body mass, however both the exact scaling…
Percolation theory has been widely used to study phase transitions in complex networked systems. It has also successfully explained several macroscopic phenomena across different fields. Yet, the existent theoretical framework for…
Until presently, most approaches for understanding physiological or pathological phenomena have been based on the assumption that these processes start from individual cells, a concept introduced primarily by Virchow in the 19th century.…
A central biological question is how natural organisms are so evolvable (capable of quickly adapting to new environments). A key driver of evolvability is the widespread modularity of biological networks--their organization as functional,…