Related papers: Thermodynamics + Natural Selection = Bayesian Infe…
Thermodynamic selection is an indirect competition between agents feeding on the same energy resource and obeying the laws of thermodynamics. We examine scenarios of this selection, where the agent is modeled as a heat-engine coupled to two…
We study the performance of different methods for processing information, incorporating narrative selection within an evolutionary model. All agents update their beliefs according to Bayes' Rule, but some strategically choose the narrative…
Natural selection can create information. In particular, because of the action of natural selection, we can often learn something about an environment by examining local organisms, and vice versa. For example, the characteristics of a…
Evolution is the process of optimal adaptation of biological populations to their living environments. This is expressed via the concept of fitness, defined as relative reproductive success. However, it has been pointed out that this…
Any organism is embedded in an environment that changes over time. The timescale for and statistics of environmental change, the precision with which the organism can detect its environment, and the costs and benefits of particular protein…
Recent theoretical progress in nonequilibrium thermodynamics, linking the physical principle of Maximum Entropy Production ("MEP") to the information-theoretical "MaxEnt" principle of scientific inference, together with conjectures from…
The dynamics of molecular collisions in a macroscopic body are encoded by the parameter Thermodynamic entropy - a statistical measure of the number of molecular configurations that correspond to a given macrostate. Directionality in the…
What is information? Is it physical? We argue that in a Bayesian theory the notion of information must be defined in terms of its effects on the beliefs of rational agents. Information is whatever constrains rational beliefs and therefore…
Here we focus on the description of the mechanisms behind the process of information aggregation and decision making, a basic step to understand emergent phenomena in society, such as trends, information spreading or the wisdom of crowds.…
A principle is modified that underlies the theory of organic fiducial inference as this theory was presented in an earlier paper. This modification, which is arguably a natural one to make, allows Bayesian inference to sometimes have a…
Information is increasingly being viewed as a resource used by organisms to increase their fitness. Indeed, it has been formally shown that there is a sensible way to assign a reproductive value to information and it is non-negative.…
The living organism is considered as an open system, whereas Prigogine's approach to the thermodynamics of such systems is used. The approach allows one to formulate the law of individual growth and development (ontogenesis) of the living…
The response of ecosystems to perturbations is considered from a thermodynamic perspective by acknowledging that, as for all macroscopic systems and processes, the dynamics and stability of ecosystems is subject to definite thermodynamic…
Bayesian mechanics provides a framework that addresses dynamical systems that can be conceptualised as Bayesian inference. However, elucidating the requisite generative models is essential for empirical applications to realistic…
Consider a branching process with a homogeneous reproduction law. Sampling a single cell uniformly from the population at a time $T > 0$ and looking along the sampled cell's ancestral lineage, we find that the reproduction law is…
An approach to implementing variational Bayesian inference in biological systems is considered, under which the thermodynamic free energy of a system directly encodes its variational free energy. In the case of the brain, this assumption…
The problem of natural selection in dispersal-structured populations consisting of individuals characterized by different diffusion coefficients is studied. The competition between the organisms is taken into account through the assumption…
Life forms exhibit such a degree of exquisite organization that it seems impossible that they could have developed out of a process of trial and error, as intimated by the theory of Darwinian evolution. In this general public paper I…
Active inference, a corollary of the free energy principle, is a formal way of describing the behavior of certain kinds of random dynamical systems that have the appearance of sentience. In this chapter, we describe how active inference…
When a mathematical or computational model is used to analyse some system, it is usual that some parameters resp.\ functions or fields in the model are not known, and hence uncertain. These parametric quantities are then identified by…