Related papers: Pragmatic Information and Gaian Development -- Fir…
In quantum experiments the acquisition and representation of basic experimental information is governed by the multinomial probability distribution. There exist unique random variables, whose standard deviation becomes asymptotically…
Social evolutionary theory seeks to explain increases in the scale and complexity of human societies, from origins to present. Over the course of the twentieth century, social evolutionary theory largely fell out of favor as a way of…
The dynamical evolution of many economic, sociological, biological and physical systems tends to be dominated by a relatively small number of unexpected, large changes (`extreme events'). We study the large, internal changes produced in a…
We survey the prospects for an Information Dynamics which can serve as the basis for a fundamental theory of information, incorporating qualitative and structural as well as quantitative aspects. We motivate our discussion with some basic…
Kin selection theory is a kind of causal analysis. The initial form of kin selection ascribed cause to costs, benefits, and genetic relatedness. The theory then slowly developed a deeper and more sophisticated approach to partitioning the…
We propose a novel definition of life in terms of which its emergence in the universe is expected, and its ever-creative open-ended evolution is entailed by no law. Living organisms are Kantian Wholes that achieve Catalytic Closure,…
As AI systems are integrated into social networks, there are AI safety concerns that AI-generated content may dominate the web, e.g. in popularity or impact on beliefs. To understand such questions, this paper proposes the Digital Ecosystem…
We try to establish a unified information theoretic approach to learning and to explore some of its applications. First, we define {\em predictive information} as the mutual information between the past and the future of a time series,…
Genetic information and environmental factors determine the path of an individuals life and therefore, the evolution of its entire species. We have succeeded in proposing and studying a model that captures this idea. In our model, a…
Motivated by the results of recent laboratory experiments (Yoshida et al. Nature, 424, 303-306 (2003)) as well as many earlier field observations that evolutionary changes can take place in ecosystems over relatively short ecological time…
Natural selection explains how life has evolved over millions of years from more primitive forms. The speed at which this happens, however, has sometimes defied formal explanations when based on random (uniformly distributed) mutations.…
Biologists rely heavily on the language of information, coding, and transmission that is commonplace in the field of information theory as developed by Claude Shannon, but there is open debate about whether such language is anything more…
When dealing with Bayesian inference the choice of the prior often remains a debatable question. Empirical Bayes methods offer a data-driven solution to this problem by estimating the prior itself from an ensemble of data. In the…
An increasing number of dissident voices claim that the standard neo-Darwinian view of genes as 'leaders' and phenotypes as 'followers' during the process of adaptive evolution should be turned on its head. This idea is older than the…
We assume that the natural intelligence (human, particularly) is equivalent to a large inferring structure, which took shape in the last 400/500 million years. Then two hypotheses, about this structure and its development, are put forward…
While a large body of work has scrutinized the meaning of conditional sentences, considerably less attention has been paid to formal models of their pragmatic use and interpretation. Here, we take a probabilistic approach to pragmatic…
Biological data objects often have both of the following features: (i) they are functions rather than single numbers or vectors, and (ii) they are correlated due to phylogenetic relationships. In this paper we give a flexible statistical…
This paper provides a behavioral analysis of conservatism in beliefs. I introduce a new axiom, Dynamic Conservatism, that relaxes Dynamic Consistency when information and prior beliefs "conflict." When the agent is a subjective expected…
Living things, computers, societies, and even books are part of a grand evolutionary struggle to survive. That struggle shapes nature, nations, religions, art, science, and you. What you think, feel, and do is determined by it. Darwinian…
Evolution is the theory that plants and animals today have come from kinds that have existed in the past. Scientists such as Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace dedicate their life to observe how species interact with their environment, grow,…