Related papers: Living is information processing: from molecules t…
The evolution of complexity has been a central theme for Biology [2] and Artificial Life research [1]. It is generally agreed that complexity has increased in our universe, giving way to life, multi-cellularity, societies, and systems of…
Relation of genome sizes to organisms complexity is still described rather equivocally. Neither the number of genes (G-value), nor the total amount of DNA (C-value) correlates consistently with phenotype complexity. Using information theory…
Integrated information theory (IIT) argues that the substrate of consciousness is a maximally irreducible complex of units. Together, subsets of the complex specify a cause-effect structure, composed of distinctions and their relations,…
We must recognize that natural language is a way of information encoding, and it encodes not only the information but also the procedures for how information is processed. To understand natural language, the same as we conceive and design…
Life is fundamentally a scientific enigma. The interplay between chaos, entropy dynamics, and Prigogine's dissipative systems offers profound insights into the emergence, stabilization, and eventual collapse of far-from-equilibrium systems.…
A general notion of information-related complexity applicable to both natural and man-made systems is proposed. The overall approach is to explicitly consider a rational agent performing a certain task with a quantifiable degree of success.…
The possibility that evolutionary forces -- together with a few fundamental factors such as thermodynamic constraints, specific computational features enabling information processing, and ecological processes -- might constrain the logic of…
It is asserted that consciousness functionally is a vision. Biologically it is a sensation of work of a brain that converts external and internal signals into visual output. However, as we well know, human consciousness includes meaning…
This paper introduces a new method to perform signal processing using cells or atoms to synthesize variation in digital data stored in optical format. Interfacing small-scale biological or chemical systems with information stored on CD, DVD…
Biological systems, from a cell to the human brain, are inherently complex. A powerful representation of such systems, described by an intricate web of relationships across multiple scales, is provided by complex networks. Recently, several…
Biological molecular machines are enzymes that simultaneously catalyze two processes, one donating free energy and second accepting it. Recent studies show that most native protein enzymes have a rich stochastic dynamics that often…
This paper discusses the meaning and scope of biological hypercomputation (BH). The framework here is computational, and from the outset it should be clear that life is not a standard Turing Machine. Living systems hypercompute, but the…
Biochemistry, ecology, and neuroscience are examples of prominent fields aiming at describing interacting systems that exhibit non-trivial couplings to complex, ever-changing environments. We have recently shown that linear interactions and…
The constituents of a complex system exchange information to function properly. Their signalling dynamics often leads to the appearance of emergent phenomena, such as phase transitions and collective behaviors. While information exchange…
The concept of evolutionary development of structures constituted a \emph{real} revolution in biology: it was possible to understand how the very complex structures of life can arise in an out-of-equilibrium system. The investigation of…
The science of consciousness has made great strides by focusing on the behavioral and neuronal correlates of experience. However, correlates are not enough if we are to understand even basic neurological fact; nor are they of much help in…
Active systems across scales, ranging from molecular machines to human crowds, are usually modeled as assemblies of self-propelled particles driven by internally generated forces. However, these models often assume memoryless dynamics and…
A central challenge in the origin of life is understanding how catalytic peptide-like polymers and information-bearing nucleic acid-like polymers emerged as an interde-pendent system. This study constructs a primordial cognitive model…
Recent developments in quantum computation have made it clear that there is a lot more to computation than the conventional Boolean algebra. Is quantum computation the most general framework for processing information? Having gathered the…
The subject of this paper is the evolution of the concept of information processing in regular structures based on multi-level processing in nested cellular automata. The essence of the proposed model is a discrete space-time containing…