Related papers: Rosen's no-go theorem for regular categories
The theoretical biologist Robert Rosen developed a highly original approach for investigating the question "What is life?", the most fundamental problem of biology. Considering that Rosen made extensive use of mathematics it might seem…
There has been on-going philosophical debate on whether artificial life models, also known as digital organisms, are truly alive. The main difficulty appears to be finding an encompassing and definite definition of life. By examining…
The intricacy and diversity inherent in living organisms present a formidable obstacle to the establishment of a universally accepted definition. Life manifests in a multitude of forms, exhibiting various attributes such as growth,…
What is the prospect of developing artificial general intelligence (AGI)? I investigate this question by systematically comparing living and algorithmic systems, with a special focus on the notion of "agency." There are three fundamental…
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…
Living systems exhibit a range of fundamental characteristics: they are active, self-referential, self-modifying systems. This paper explores how these characteristics create challenges for conventional scientific approaches and why they…
Stochastic orders are very useful tool to compare the lifetimes of two coherent systems. We show that, under certain conditions, a coherent system of used components performs better (worse) than a used coherent system with respect to…
Following extensive numerical experiments, it has been suggested that the evolution of competing computer programs in artificial life simulations shows signs of being a self-organized critical process. The primary evidence for this claim…
Niels Bohr's arguments indicating the non-applicability of quantum methodology to the study of the ultimate details of life given in his book "Atomic physics and human knowledge" conflict with the commonly held opposite view. The bases for…
A fundamental question is whether Turing machines can model all reasoning processes. We introduce an existence principle stating that the perception of the physical existence of any Turing program can serve as a physical causation for the…
A (closed) dynamical system is a notion of how things can be, together with a notion of how they may change given how they are. The idea and mathematics of closed dynamical systems has proven incredibly useful in those sciences that can…
We dwell upon the physicist's conception of `life' since Schroedinger and Wigner through to the modern-day language of living systems in the light of quantum information. We discuss some basic features of a living system such as ordinary…
The title refers to the Free Will Theorem by Conway and Kochen whose flashy formulation is: if experimenters possess free will, then so do particles. In more modest terms, the theorem says that individual pairs of spacelike separated…
Various research initiatives try to utilize the operational principles of organisms and brains to develop alternative, biologically inspired computing paradigms and artificial cognitive systems. This paper reviews key features of the…
Component systems - ensembles of realizations built from a shared repertoire of modular parts - are ubiquitous in biological, ecological, technological, and socio-cultural domains. From genomes to texts, cities, and software, these systems…
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 document is written with the intention to describe in detail a method and means by which a computer program can reason about the world and in so doing, increase its analogue to a living system. As the literature is rife and it is…
A celebrated and controversial hypothesis conjectures that some biological systems --parts, aspects, or groups of them-- may extract important functional benefits from operating at the edge of instability, halfway between order and…
We propose an AC-independent proof of the existence of a non-measurable set as a consequence of the Hahn-Banach theorem of functional analysis which is known to be strictly weaker than AC.
I reason here that the known folk law in biology that there is no general law in biology because of exceptions is false. The (quantitative) systems biology offers the potential to solve the Borges Dilemma, by transcending it. There have…