Related papers: Matter & Mind Matter
Biological organisms are composed of numerous interconnected biochemical processes. Diseases occur when normal functionality of these processes is disrupted. Thus, understanding these biochemical processes and their interrelationships is a…
The informational synthesis of neural structures, processes, parameters and characteristics that allow a unified description and modeling as neural machines of natural and artificial neural systems is presented. The general informational…
Many cellular processes involve information processing and decision making. We can probe these processes at increasing molecular detail. The analysis of heterogeneous data remains a challenge that requires new ways of thinking about cells…
Understanding the rules underlying organismal development is a major unsolved problem in biology. Each cell in a developing organism responds to signals in its local environment by dividing, excreting, consuming, or reorganizing, yet how…
Biological neural networks are shaped both by evolution across generations and by individual learning within an organism's lifetime, whereas standard artificial neural networks undergo a single, large training procedure without inherited…
We extend the concept that life is an informational phenomenon, at every level of organisation, from molecules to the global ecological system. According to this thesis: (a) living is information processing, in which memory is maintained by…
Continuous, adaptive learning, the ability to adapt to the environment and keep improving performance, is a hallmark of natural intelligence. Biological organisms excel in acquiring, transferring, and retaining knowledge while adapting to…
Living organisms process information to interact and adapt to their changing environment with the goal of finding food, mates or averting hazards. The structure of their niche has profound repercussions by both selecting their internal…
Continuous adaptation allows survival in an ever-changing world. Adjustments in the synaptic coupling strength between neurons are essential for this capability, setting us apart from simpler, hard-wired organisms. How these changes can be…
The term ``neuromorphic'' refers to systems that are closely resembling the architecture and/or the dynamics of biological neural networks. Typical examples are novel computer chips designed to mimic the architecture of a biological brain,…
In this Chapter, we ask questions (1) What is the right way to measure the quality of information processing in a biological system? and (2) What can real-life organisms do in order to improve their performance in information-processing…
Biological organisms are open, adaptve systems that can respond to changes in environment in specific ways. Adaptation and response can be posed as an optimization problem, with a tradeoff between the benefit obtained from a response and…
In this work we propose a computational scheme inspired by the workings of human cognition. We embed some fundamental aspects of the human cognitive system into this scheme in order to obtain a minimization of computational resources and…
Transitional accounts of evolution emphasise a few changes that shape what is evolvable, with dramatic consequences for derived lineages. More recently it has been proposed that cognition might also have evolved via a series of major…
Drawing inspiration from animal navigation strategies, we introduce a novel computational model for navigation and mapping, rooted in biologically inspired principles. Animals exhibit remarkable navigation abilities by efficiently using…
Behavioral changes in animals and humans, as a consequence of an error or a verbal instruction, can be extremely rapid. Improvement in behavioral performances are usually associated in machine learning and reinforcement learning to synaptic…
With the completion of human genome mapping, the focus of scientists seeking to explain the biological complexity of living systems is shifting from analyzing the individual components (such as a particular gene or biochemical reaction) to…
Humans are continuously exposed to a stream of visual data with a natural temporal structure. However, most successful computer vision algorithms work at image level, completely discarding the precious information carried by motion. In this…
A biological circuit is a neural or biochemical cascade, taking inputs and producing outputs. How have biological circuits learned to solve environmental challenges over the history of life? The answer certainly follows Dobzhansky's famous…
Thanks to recent technological advances, it is now possible to track with an unprecedented precision and for long periods of time the movement patterns of many living organisms in their habitat. The increasing amount of data available on…