Description
Recent advances suggest that the concept of information might hold the key to unravelling the mystery of life's nature and origin. Fresh insights from a broad and authoritative range of articulate and respected experts focus on the transition from matter to life, and hence reconcile the deep conceptual schism between the way we describe physical and biological systems. A unique cross-disciplinary perspective, drawing on expertise from philosophy, biology, chemistry, physics, and cognitive and social sciences, provides a new way to look at the deepest questions of our existence. This book addresses the role of information in life, and how it can make a difference to what we know about the world. Students, researchers, and all those interested in what life is and how it began will gain insights into the nature of life and its origins that touch on nearly every domain of science.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction Sara Imari Walker, Paul C. W. Davies and F. R. Ellis; Part I. Physics and Life: 2. The 'hard problem' of life Sara Imari Walker and Paul C. W. Davies; 3. Beyond initial conditions and laws of motion: constructor theory of information and life Chiara Marletto; Part II. Bio from Bit: 4. (How) did information emerge? Anne-Marie Grisogono; 5. On the emerging codes for chemical evolution Jillian E. Smith-Carpenter, Sha Li, Jay T. Goodwin, Anil K. Mehta and David G. Lynn; 6. Digital and analogue information in organisms Denis Noble; 7. From entropy to information: biased typewriters and the origin of life Christoph Adami and Thomas Labar; Part III. Life's Hidden Information: 8. Cryptographic nature David Krakauer; 9. Noise and function Steven Weinstein and Theodore Pavlic; 10. The many faces of state space compression David Wolpert, Eric Libby, Joshua Grochow and Simon DeDeo; 11. Causality, information and biological computation: an algorithmic software approach to life, disease and the immune system Hector Zenil, Angelika Schmidt and Jesper Tegnér; Part IV. Complexity and Causality: 12. Life's information hierarchy Jessica Flack; 13. Living through downward causation: from molecules to ecosystems Keith D. Farnsworth, George F. R. Ellis and Luc Jaeger; 14. Automata and animats: from dynamics to cause-effect structures Larissa Albantakis and Giulio Tononi; 15. Biological information, causality and specificity – an intimate relationship Karola Stotz and Paul Griffiths; Part V. From Matter to Mind: 16. Major transitions in political order Simon DeDeo; 17. Bits from biology for computational intelligence Michael Wibral, Joseph Lizier and Viola Priesemann; 18. Machine learning and the questions it raises G. Andrew D. Briggs and Dawid Potgieter.
