Related papers: Defining and finding lifelike entities with a lazy…
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…
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…
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,…
The organism is a fundamental concept in biology. However there is no universally accepted, formal, and yet broadly applicable definition of what an organism is. Here we introduce a candidate definition. We adopt the view that the…
One thing that discriminates living things from inanimate matter is their ability to generate similarly complex or non-random architectures in a large abundance. From DNA sequences to folded protein structures, living cells, microbial…
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 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…
Empirical evidence suggesting that living systems might operate in the vicinity of critical points, at the borderline between order and disorder, has proliferated in recent years, with examples ranging from spontaneous brain activity to…
The question What is Complexity? has occupied a great deal of time and paper over the last 20 or so years. There are a myriad different perspectives and definitions but still no consensus. In this paper I take a phenomenological approach,…
The question of "what is life?" has challenged scientists and philosophers for centuries, producing an array of definitions that reflect both the mystery of its emergence and the diversity of disciplinary perspectives brought to bear on the…
Plasticity is a fundamental property of complex systems, such as the brain or an organism. Yet it typically remains a descriptive concept inferred retrospectively from observed outcomes, such as modifications in activity or morphology.…
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…
Ecosystems are commonly conceptualized as networks of interacting species. However, partitioning natural diversity of organisms into discrete units is notoriously problematic, and mounting experimental evidence raises the intriguing…
Entities and relationships between entities are vital in the real world. Essentially, we understand the world by understanding entities and relations. For instance, to understand a field, e.g., computer science, we need to understand the…
The basic idea of lifelike computing systems is the transfer of concepts in living systems to technical use that goes even beyond existing concepts of self-adaptation and self-organisation (SASO). As a result, these systems become even more…
A modeling formalism is proposed for the description and study of living and life-like systems. It provides an abstract conceptual model framework for real life and evolution of biological organisms. It is proposed, that this model…
The multifarious internal workings of organisms are difficult to reconcile with a single feature defining a state of being alive. Indeed, definitions of life rely on emergent properties (growth, capacity to evolve, agency) only symptomatic…
Collectives form non-equilibrium social structures characterised by a volatile dynamics. Individuals join or leave. Social relations change quickly. Therefore, differently from engineered or ecological systems, a resilient reference state…
This paper explores the idea that information is an essential and distinctive feature of living systems. Unlike non-living systems, living systems actively acquire, process, and use information about their environments to respond to…
We investigate the fine-grained complexity of liveness verification for leader contributor systems. These consist of a designated leader thread and an arbitrary number of identical contributor threads communicating via a shared memory. The…