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As generative AI technologies rapidly advance, AI agents are gaining the ability not only to collect data and perform tasks but also to respond to environments and evolve over time. This shift opens new possibilities for reimagining digital…

The so-called Baldwin Effect generally says how learning, as a form of ontogenetic adaptation, can influence the process of phylogenetic adaptation, or evolution. This idea has also been taken into computation in which evolution and…

Humans stand alone in terms of their potential to collectively and cumulatively change their culture in an open-ended manner. This open-endedness provides societies with the ability to continually expand their resources and to increase…

We study open-ended evolution by focusing on computational and information-processing dynamics underlying major evolutionary transitions. In doing so, we consider biological organisms as hierarchical dynamical systems that generate…

A remarkable feature of human beings is their capacity for creative behaviour, referring to their ability to react to problems in ways that are novel, surprising, and useful. Transformational creativity is a form of creativity where the…

Cultural accumulation drives the open-ended and diverse progress in capabilities spanning human history. It builds an expanding body of knowledge and skills by combining individual exploration with inter-generational information…

In lieu of an abstract here is the first paragraph: No other species remotely approaches the human capacity for the cultural evolution of novelty that is accumulative, adaptive, and open-ended (i.e., with no a priori limit on the size or…

In our understanding, a mind-map is an adaptive engine that basically works incrementally on the fundament of existing transactional streams. Generally, mind-maps consist of symbolic cells that are connected with each other and that become…

This paper describes a tentative model for how discrete memories transform into an interconnected conceptual network, or worldview, wherein relationships between memories are forged by way of abstractions. The model draws on Kauffman's…

The mental lexicon is a complex cognitive system representing information about the words/concepts that one knows. Decades of psychological experiments have shown that conceptual associations across multiple, interactive cognitive levels…

It is becoming widely accepted that very early in the origin of life, even before the emergence of genetic encoding, reaction networks of diverse small chemicals might have manifested key properties of life, namely self-propagation and…

Biomolecular communication demands that interactions between parts of a molecular system act as scaffolds for message transmission. It also requires an evolving and organized system of signs - a communicative agency - for creating and…

Although it has been notoriously difficult to pin down precisely what it is that makes life so distinctive and remarkable, there is general agreement that its informational aspect is one key property, perhaps the key property. The unique…

Interpreting computations in the visual cortex as learning and inference in a generative model of the environment has received wide support both in neuroscience and cognitive science. However, hierarchical computations, a hallmark of visual…

The human connectome represents a network map of the brain's wiring diagram and the pattern into which its connections are organized is thought to play an important role in cognitive function. The generative rules that shape the topology of…

The Machine Consciousness Hypothesis states that consciousness is a substrate-free functional property of computational systems capable of second-order perception. I propose a research program to investigate this idea in silico by studying…

Growing interest in modelling complex systems from brains to societies to cities using networks has led to increased efforts to describe generative processes that explain those networks. Recent successes in machine learning have prompted…

Network science can offer fundamental insights into the structural and functional properties of complex systems. For example, it is widely known that neuronal circuits tend to organize into basic functional topological modules, called…

The study of neural computation aims to understand the function of a neural system as an information processing machine. Neural systems are undoubtedly complex, necessitating principled and automated tools to abstract away details to…

This paper presents a comprehensive five-stage evolutionary framework for understanding the development of artificial intelligence, arguing that its trajectory mirrors the historical progression of human cognitive technologies. We posit…