Related papers: Rosen's no-go theorem for regular categories
Nature has found one method of organizing living matter, but maybe other options exist -- not yet discovered -- on how to create life. To study the life "as it could be" is the objective of an interdisciplinary field called Artificial Life…
Self-replication is central to all life, and yet how it dynamically emerges in physical, non-equilibrium systems remains poorly understood. Von Neumann's pioneering work in the 1940s and subsequent developments suggest a natural hypothesis:…
Living systems self-organize in ways that conventional physical frameworks-based on forces, energies, and continuous fields-cannot fully capture. Processes like gene regulation and cellular decision-making involve rule-based logic and…
Discovered by Christopher Alexander, living structure is a physical phenomenon, through which the quality of the built environment or artifacts can be judged objectively. It bears two distinguished properties just like a tree: "far more…
Biological and robotic grasp and manipulation are undeniably similar at the level of mechanical task performance. However, their underlying fundamental biological vs. engineering mechanisms are, by definition, dramatically different and can…
An introduction to some basic ideas of the author's "quantum cybernetics" is given, which depicts waves and "particles" as mutually dependent system components, thus defining "organizationally closed systems" characterized by a fundamental…
It is generally recognized that a distinguishing feature of life is its peculiar capability to avoid equilibration. The origin of this capability and its evolution along the timeline of abiogenesis is not yet understood. We propose to study…
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…
Instances of critical-like characteristics in living systems at each organizational level as well as the spontaneous emergence of computation (Langton), indicate the relevance of self-organized criticality (SOC). But extrapolating complex…
We introduce the concept of an abstract evolution system, which provides a convenient framework for studying generic mathematical structures and their properties. Roughly speaking, an evolution system is a category endowed with a selected…
At the heart of many contemporary theories of life is the concept of biological self-organisation: organisms have to continuously produce and maintain the conditions of their own existence in order to stay alive. The way in which these…
We study an impact of a random environment on lifetimes of coherent systems with dependent components. There are two combined sources of this dependence. One results from the dependence of the components of the coherent system operating in…
The molecular biology revolution of the last seventy five years has transformed our view of living systems. Scientific explanations of biological phenomena are now synonymous with the identification of the genes, proteins, and signaling…
Life continuously changes its own components and states at each moment through interaction with the external world, while maintaining its own individuality in a cyclical manner. Such a property, known as "autonomy," has been formulated…
Algorithms have been fundamental to recent global technological advances and, in particular, they have been the cornerstone of technical advances in one field rapidly being applied to another. We argue that algorithms possess fundamentally…
Systems of germs of sets in infinite-dimensional spaces are introduced and studied. Such a system corresponds to a local zero-set of an ideal of the ring of analytic functions of infinite number of variables. Conversely, this system of…
With unprecedented advances in genetic engineering we are starting to see progressively more original examples of synthetic life. As such organisms become more common it is desirable to be able to distinguish between natural and artificial…
The dynamic instability of the living systems and the "superposition" of different forms of randomness are viewed as a component of the contingently increasing organization of life along evolution. We briefly survey how classical and…
Although living organisms are affected by many interrelated and unidentified variables, this complexity does not automatically impose a fundamental limitation on statistical inference. Nor need one invoke such complexity as an explanation…
The conditions for proper definitions in mathematics are given, in terms of the theory of definition, on the basis of the criterions of eliminability and non-creativity. As a definition, Russell's antinomy is a violation of the criterion of…