Related papers: Living is information processing: from molecules t…
Life depends as much on the flow of information as on the flow of energy. Here we review the many efforts to make this intuition precise. Starting with the building blocks of information theory, we explore examples where it has been…
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…
This article presents a naturalist approach to cognition understood as a network of info-computational, autopoietic processes in living systems. It provides a conceptual framework for the unified view of cognition as evolved from the…
Merely by existing, all physical systems contain information, and physical dynamics transforms and processes that information. This note investigates the information processing power of living systems. Living systems harvest free energy…
``The purpose of life is to obtain knowledge, use it to live with as much satisfaction as possible, and pass it on with improvements and modifications to the next generation.'' This may sound philosophical, and the interpretation of words…
Biology has taken strong steps towards becoming a computer science aiming at reprogramming nature after the realisation that nature herself has reprogrammed organisms by harnessing the power of natural selection and the digital prescriptive…
The multifarious internal workings of organisms are difficult to reconcile with a single feature defining a state of being alive. Indeed, definitions of life rely on emergent properties (growth, capacity to evolve, agency) only symptomatic…
Even when concepts similar to emergence have been used since antiquity, we lack an agreed definition. However, emergence has been identified as one of the main features of complex systems. Most would agree on the statement ``life is…
This paper discusses the benefits of describing the world as information, especially in the study of the evolution of life and cognition. Traditional studies encounter problems because it is difficult to describe life and cognition in terms…
Information is a key concept in evolutionary biology. Information is stored in biological organism's genomes, and used to generate the organism as well as to maintain and control it. Information is also "that which evolves". When a…
We consider a living organism as an observer of the evolution of its environment recording sensory information about the state space X of the environment in real time. Sensory information is sampled and then processed on two levels. On the…
Living systems can be understood as organized entities that capture, transform, and reproduce information. Classical gene-centered models explain adaptation through frequency changes driven by differential fitness, yet they often overlook…
To maintain homeostasis, living cells process information with networks of interacting molecules. Traditional models for cellular information processing have focused on networks of chemical reactions between molecules. Here, we describe how…
The informational synthesis of neural structures, processes, parameters and characteristics that allow a unified description and modeling as neural machines of natural and artificial neural systems is presented. The general informational…
What is information, physically, and why does it so reliably emerge in living, cultural, and technological systems? Existing theories quantify uncertainty, cost, or compressibility, but do not identify which physical structures count as…
Living organisms are not just random collections of organic molecules. There is continuous information processing going on in the apparent bouncing around of molecules of life. Optimisation criteria in this information processing can be…
One of the most compelling problems in science consists in understanding how living systems process information. After all, the way they process information defines their capacities to learning and adaptation. There is an increasing…
I propose here a new concept of information based on two relevant aspects of its expression. The first related to the undeniable fact that the expression of information modifies the physical state of its receiver. The second to the…
In computer science, we can theoretically neatly separate transmission and processing of information, hardware and software, and programs and their inputs. This is much more intricate in biology, Nevertheless, I argue that Shannon's concept…
Life is commonly described as a self-organized, far-from-equilibrium process that maintains internal order by consuming free energy and exporting entropy. This thermodynamic view underlies diverse theoretical frameworks -- from autopoiesis…