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Casimir-Lifshitz forces generate an unavoidable, long-range attraction between protocells under prebiotically realistic conditions. This interaction stabilizes mesoscale clusters such as tetrahedra, octahedra, and 13-cell icosahedra. These…
What is information, physically, and why does it so reliably emerge in living, cultural, and technological systems? Existing theories quantify uncertainty, cost, or compressibility, but do not identify which physical structures count as…
We present a theory of information expressed solely in terms of which transformations of physical systems are possible and which are impossible - i.e. in constructor-theoretic terms. Although it includes conjectured laws of physics that are…
The building of minimal self-reproducing systems with a physical embodiment (generically called protocells) is a great challenge, with implications for both theory and applied sciences. Although the classical view of a living protocell…
We argue for a convergence of crystallography, materials science and biology, that will come about through asking materials questions about biology and biological questions about materials, illuminated by considerations of information. The…
Computational biology is on the verge of a paradigm shift in its research practice - from a data-based (computational) paradigm to an information-based (cognitive) paradigm. As in the other research fields, this transition is impeded by…
Pretraining on large, semantically rich datasets is key for developing language models. Surprisingly, recent studies have shown that even synthetic data, generated procedurally through simple semantic-free algorithms, can yield some of the…
Traditionally, cognition has been considered a uniquely human capability involving perception, memory, learning, reasoning, and problem-solving. However, recent research shows that cognition is a fundamental ability shared by all living…
Integrated information theory (IIT) argues that the substrate of consciousness is a maximally irreducible complex of units. Together, subsets of the complex specify a cause-effect structure, composed of distinctions and their relations,…
The coexistence between different types of templates has been the choice solution to the information crisis of prebiotic evolution, triggered by the finding that a single RNA-like template cannot carry enough information to code for any…
Notions like meaning, signal, intentionality, are difficult to relate to a physical word. I study a purely physical definition of "meaningful information", from which these notions can be derived. It is inspired by a model recently…
Living systems can be understood as organized entities that capture, transform, and reproduce information. Classical gene-centered models explain adaptation through frequency changes driven by differential fitness, yet they often overlook…
A new prior is proposed for learning representations of high-level concepts of the kind we manipulate with language. This prior can be combined with other priors in order to help disentangling abstract factors from each other. It is…
Socio-cognitive action reproduces and changes both social and cognitive structures. The analytical distinction between these dimensions of structure provides us with richer models of scientific development. In this study, I assume that (i)…
"Information Processing" is a recently launched buzzword whose meaning is vague and obscure even for the majority of its users. The reason for this is the lack of a suitable definition for the term "information". In my attempt to amend this…
In biological systems, the capacity of anticipation--that is, entertaining a model of the system within the system--can be considered as naturally given. Human languages enable psychological systems to construct and exchange mental models…
Psychological and social systems provide us with a natural domain for the study of anticipations because these systems are based on and operate in terms of intentionality. Psychological systems can be expected to contain a model of…
This paper proposes a conceptual framework in which intelligence and consciousness emerge from relational structure rather than from prediction or domain-specific mechanisms. Intelligence is defined as the capacity to form and integrate…
The discipline of `theoretical biology' has been developing from its inception several decades ago almost in parallel with the advances in biology, so much so that the latter is often considered to be almost exclusively an empirical…
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…