Related papers: Open Questions about Time and Self-reference in Li…

Can reproduction alone in the context of survival produce intelligence in our machines? In this work, self-replication is explored as a mechanism for the emergence of intelligent behavior in modern learning environments. By focusing purely…

We consider a living organism as an observer of the evolution of its environment recording sensory information about the state space X of the environment in real time. Sensory information is sampled and then processed on two levels. On the…

Many biological systems are governed by difference equations and exhibit discrete-time dynamics. Examples include the size of a population when generations are non-overlapping, and the incidence of a disease when infections are recorded at…

Reference is a crucial property of language that allows us to connect linguistic expressions to the world. Modeling it requires handling both continuous and discrete aspects of meaning. Data-driven models excel at the former, but struggle…

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 problem of the Nature of Time is twofold: whether or not time is a fundamental quantity of Nature, and how does clock time of metrology emerge in the experimental description of dynamics. This work strongly supports the fundamental…

The current social reality is characterized by all-encompassing change, which disrupts existing social structures at all levels. Yet the prevailing view of society is based on the ontological primacy of stable hierarchical structures, which…

All aspects of our society, including the life sciences, need a mechanism for people working within them to represent the concepts they employ to carry out their research. For the information systems being designed and developed to support…

One of the most basic functions of language is to refer to objects in a shared scene. Modeling reference with continuous representations is challenging because it requires individuation, i.e., tracking and distinguishing an arbitrary number…

Like all natural systems, great societies and their cultures emerge by a growth process from their environments, developing, organized, and behaving as wholes with their internal designs linked with their external worlds. So the general…

A notion of time is fundamental in the study of dynamical systems. Time arises as a standalone dynamical system and also in solutions or trajectories as a special kind of map between systems. We characterize time by a universal property and…

Biological systems, unlike physical or chemical systems, are characterized by the very inhomogeneous distribution of their components. The immune system, in particular, is notable for self-organizing its structure. Classically, the dynamics…

In living systems, we often see the emergence of the ingredients necessary for computation -- the capacity for information transmission, storage, and modification -- begging the question of how we may exploit or imitate such biological…

Time perception - how humans and animals perceive the passage of time - forms the basis for important cognitive skills such as decision-making, planning, and communication. In this work, we propose a framework for examining the mechanisms…

The capacity to adapt can greatly influence the success of systems that need to compensate for damaged parts, learn how to achieve robust performance in new environments, or exploit novel opportunities that originate from new technological…

I propose here a new concept of information based on two relevant aspects of its expression. The first related to the undeniable fact that the expression of information modifies the physical state of its receiver. The second to the…

Using the previously developed concepts of semantic spacetime, I explore the interpretation of knowledge representations, and their structure, as a semantic system, within the framework of promise theory. By assigning interpretations to…

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…

Interactions with large language models have led to the suggestion that these models may soon be conscious. From the perspective of neuroscience, this position is difficult to defend. For one, the inputs to large language models lack the…

The rapid evolution of artificial intelligence has led to expectations of transformative impact on science, yet current systems remain fundamentally limited in enabling genuine scientific discovery. This perspective contends that progress…