Related papers: Contextual emergence of intentionality
A hallmark of life on Earth is the ability of agents to exert causal power and be drivers of subsequent events. This is key to cognition at all scales. Causal emergence, measuring the degree to which an agent exerts unique predictive power…
In previous work, artificial agents were shown to achieve almost perfect accuracy in referential games where they have to communicate to identify images. Nevertheless, the resulting communication protocols rarely display salient features of…
Algorithms for computing equilibria, optima, and fixed points in nonconvex problems often depend sensitively on practitioner-chosen initial conditions. When uniqueness of a solution is of interest, a common heuristic is to run such…
Causal discovery is at the core of human cognition. It enables us to reason about the environment and make counterfactual predictions about unseen scenarios that can vastly differ from our previous experiences. We consider the task of…
In this paper we consider a layer of incompressible viscous fluid lying above a flat periodic surface in a uniform gravitational field. The upper boundary of the fluid is free and evolves in time. We assume that a mass of surfactants…
Networked dynamical systems are common throughout science in engineering; e.g., biological networks, reaction networks, power systems, and the like. For many such systems, nonlinearity drives populations of identical (or near-identical)…
Active inference helps us simulate adaptive behavior and decision-making in biological and artificial agents. Building on our previous work exploring the relationship between active inference, well-being, resilience, and sustainability, we…
The term emergence is increasingly used across scientific disciplines to describe phenomena that arise from interactions among a system's components but cannot be readily inferred by examining those components in isolation. While often…
Dynamical clustering represents a characteristic feature of active matter consisting of self-propelled agents that convert energy from the environment into mechanical motion. At the micron scale, typical of overdamped dynamics, particles…
How can we derive the evolution equations of dissipative systems? What is the relation between the different approaches? How much do we understand the fundamental aspects of a second law based framework? Is there a hierarchy of dissipative…
Many natural phenomena evolve intermittently, with periods of tranquillity interrupted by bursts of activity, rather than following a smooth gradual path. Examples include earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, solar flares, gamma-ray bursts, and…
A state selected at random from the Hilbert space of a many-body system is overwhelmingly likely to exhibit highly non-classical correlations. For these typical states, half of the environment must be measured by an observer to determine…
Large transformer-based models are able to perform in-context few-shot learning, without being explicitly trained for it. This observation raises the question: what aspects of the training regime lead to this emergent behavior? Here, we…
The Rosensweig instability is the phenomenon that above a certain threshold of a vertical magnetic field peaks appear on the free surface of a horizontal layer of magnetic fluid. In contrast to almost all classical hydrodynamical systems,…
Topological concepts have been employed to understand the ground states of many strongly correlated systems, but it is still quite unclear if and how topology manifests itself in the relaxation dynamics. Here we uncover emergent topological…
Out of thermal equilibrium, an environment imposes effective mechanical forces on microscopical nanofabricated devices, chemical or biological systems. Here we address the question of how to calculate these forces together with the response…
We introduce a notion of emergence for coarse-grained macroscopic variables associated with highly-multivariate microscopic dynamical processes, in the context of a coupled dynamical environment. Dynamical independence instantiates the…
The presence of active forces in various biological and artificial systems may change how those systems behaves under forcing. We present a minimal model of a suspension of passive or active swimmers driven on the boundaries by…
Many biological systems collectively construct complex, adaptive, and functional architectures, where function emerges from bottom-up building processes rather than top-down planning or centralized control. However, general strategies for…
The problem of the insensitivity of the macroscopic behavior of any thermodynamical system to partitioning generates a bias between the reproducibility of its macroscopic behavior viewed as the simplest form of causality and its long-term…