I. Planatural PhiloSophia: An Integral View of a Phenomenal, Independent, Procreative Actuality

C. Our Earthumanity Glimpses a Familiar, Ecorganic, Evogenesis, Ecode Universality and Vital Purpose

This subsequent An Earthumanity Era: A 2020s Cerebral, Knowsphere Cognizance Proceeds Apace, along with Earth Learns: Interactive Person/Planet, Self-Organizing, WorldWise Collaborations as a latest inclusive frontier. It will seek to gather and highlight premier contributions into the 2020s. Our intent is to identify, join and report a wide array of convergent. integral advances that brace and presage an immenient phenomenal revolution. We open with a broad array of current highlight contributions.

Alser, Mohammed, et al. Going from Molecules to Genomic Variations to Scientific Discovery. arXiv:2205.07957.
Araujo, Nuno, et al. Steering Self-Organization through Confinement. arXiv:2204.10059.
Artime, Oriol and Manlio De Domenico. From the Origin of Life to Pandemics: Emergent Phenomena in Complex Systems. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A. May 2022.
Aschwanden, Markus. The Fractality of Astrophysical Self-Organized Criticality. arXiv:2203.12484.
Azarian, Bobby. The Romance of Reality: How the Universe Organizes Itself to Create Life, Consciousness and Cosmic Complexity. Dallas, TX: BenBella Books, 2022.

Ball, Philip. Physicists Rewrite the Fundamental Law that Leads to Disorder. Quanta. May 26, 2022.
Barzon, Giacomo, et al. Criticality and Network Structure Drive Emergent Oscillations in a Stochastic Whole-Brain Model. Journal of Physics: Complexity. 3/3, 2022.
Bogdan, Paul, et al. Biological Networks Across Scales. Integrative & Comparative Biology. 61/6, 2021.
Bowick, Mark, et al. Symmetry, Thermodynamics and Topology in Active Matter. Physical Review X. February, 2022.
Boyle, Rebecca. Astronomers Reimagine the Making of the Planets. Quanta. June 6, 2022.
Butler, Travis and Georgi Georgiev. Self-Organization in Stellar Evolution. arXiv:2202.02318.

Canup, Robin and Philip Christensen, Co-Chairs. Origins, Worlds and Life: A Decadal Strategy for Planetary Science and Astrobiology. Washington, DC: National Academy of Sciences, 2022.
Carbone, Anna, et al. Journal of Physics: Complexity. June, 2022.
Cavagna, Andrea, et al. Natural Swarms in 3.99 Dimensions. arXiv:2107.04432.
Cejkova, Jitka and Julyan Cartwright. Chembrionics and Systems Chemistry. ChemSystemsChem. 4/3, 2022.
Chanu, Athokpam, et al. Analysis of the Structural Complexity of Crab Nebula using a Multifractal Approach. arXiv:2206.04717.
Costa, Luciano. Coincidence Complex Networks. Journal of Physics: Complexity. 3/1, 2022. On Similarity. arXiv:2111.02803.
Czegel, Daniel, et al. Bayes and Darwin: How Replicator Populations Implement Bayesian Computations. BioEssays. 44/4, 2022.

Dambricourt Malasse, Anne, ed.. Self-Organization as a New Paradigm in Evolutionary Biology. International: Springer, 2022.
De Marzo, Giordano, et al. Zipf’s Law for Cosmic Structures. Astronomy & Astrophysics. 651/A114, 2021.
Domingues, Guilherme, et al. City Motifs as Revealed by Similarity between Hierarchical Features. arXiv:2204.09104.

Fontana, Walter. From Computation to Life: The Challenge of a Science of Organization. www.walterfontana.zone/writings
Frank, Adam, et al. Intelligence as a Planetary Scale Process. International Journal of Astrobiology. February, 2022.
Frottier, Theo, et al. Harmonic Structures of Beethoven Quarters: A Complex Network Approach. arXiv:2201.08796.

Gagler, Dylan, et al. Scaling Laws in Enzyme Function Reveal a Biochemical Universality. PNAS. 119/9, 2022.
Garcia, Raquel, et al. Self-Similar Solutions for Fuzzy Dark Matter.
Garcia-Sanchez, Miguel, et al. The Emergence of Interstellar Molecular Complexity Explained by Interacting Networks. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 119/30, 2022. arXiv:2203.05995.
George, Ashish, et al. Functional Universality in Microbial Communities Arises from Thermodynamic Constraints. arXiv:2203.06128.
Ginsburg, Simona and Eva Jablonka. Picturing the Mind: Consciousness through the Lens of Evolution. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2022.
Gosak,, Marko, et al. Networks Behind the Morphology and Structural Design of Living Systems. Physics of Life Reviews. March, 2022.
Grossberg, Stephen. Conscious Mind, Resonant Brain: How Each Brain Makes a Mind. New York: Oxford University Press,, 2022.

Hausmann, Markus, et al. Laterality Entering the Next Decade: The 25th Anniversary of a Journal Devoted to Asymmetries of Brain, Behavior and Cognition. Laterality. 26/3, 2021.
Heylighen, Francis, et al. The Role of Self-Maintaining Resilient Reaction Networks in the Origin and Evolution of Life. Biosystems. Vol. 219, September 2022.
Holford, Mande and Benjamin Normark. Integrating the Life Sciences to Jumpstart the Next Decade of Discover. Integrative & Comparative Biology. 61/6, 2021
Hsieh, Shannon, et al. The Phanerozoic Aftermath of the Cambrian Information Revolution. Paleobiology. 48/3, 2022.
Hynes, William, et al. Systemic Resilience in Economics. Nature Physics.18/4, 2022.

Ippoliti, Xiao, et al. Observation of Time-Crystalline Eigenstate Order on a Quantum Processor. arXiv:2107.13571.

Jagiello, Robert, et al. Tradition and Invention: The Bifocal Stance Theory of Cultural Evolution. Behavioral and Brain Sciences. April, 2022.
Jusup, Marko, et al. Social Physics. arXiv: 2110.01866.

Kelso, Scott. On the Coordination Dynamics of (animate) Moving Bodies. Journal of Physics: Complexity. 3/3, 2022.
Kocoglu, Cemile, et al. How Network-based Approaches can Complement Identification Studies in Frontotemporal Dementia. Trends in Genetics. 38/9, 2022.
Koksal, Elif, et al. Spontaneous Formation of Prebiotic Compartment Colonies on Hadean Earth and Pre-Noachian Mars. ChemSystemsChem. 4/3, 2022.
Krenn, Mario, et al. On Scientific Understanding with Artificial Intelligence. arXiv:2204.01467.
Kuppers, Bernd-Olaf. The Language of Living Matter: How Molecules Acquire Meaning. International: Springer Frontiers, 2021.
Kverkova, Kristina et al. The Evolution of Brain Neuron Numbers in Amniotes. PNAS. 119/11, 2022.

Lavin, Alexander, et al. Simulation Intelligence: Towards a New Generation of Scientific Methods. arXiv:2112.03235.
Liang, Junhao and Changsong Zhou. Criticality Enhances the Multilevel Reliability of Stimulus Responses in Cortical Neural Networks. PLOS Computational Biology.. January 2022.
Liu, Jiazhen, et al. The Emergence of Polarization in Coevolving Networks. arXiv:2205.14480.

Marshall, Stuart, et al. Formalizing the Pathways to Life using Assembly Spaces. Entropy. 24/7, 2022.
Menichetti, Giulia and Albert-Laszlo Barabasi. Nutrient Concentrations in Food Display Universal Behavior. Nature Food. 3/375, 2022.
Munoz, Victor and Eduardo Flandez. Complex Network Study of Solar Magnetograms. Entropy. 24/6, 2022.

Newman, Stuart. Self-Organization in Embryonic Development. arXiv:2108.00532
Nguyen, Thank, et al. Spatial Patterns of Urban Landscapes in the Indian Punjab are Predicted by Fractal Theory. Nature Scientific Reports. 12/1819, 2022.

Olse,, Stephanie, et al. The Effect of Ocean Salinity on Climate and its Implications for Earth’s Habitability. arXiv:2205.06785.
Ouellette, Nicholas. A Physics Perspective on Collective Animal Behavior. Physical Biology. 19/2, 2022.

Provata, Astero. From Turing Patterns to Chimera States in the 2D Brusselator Model. arXiv:2212.01297.

Rao, Riccardo and Stanislas Leibler. Evolutionary Dynamics, Evolutionary Forces, and Robustness: A Nonequilibrium Statistical Mechanics Perspective. PNAS. 119/13, 2022.
Ravishankara, A. R., et al. Ravishankara, A. R., et al. Complex and Yet Predictable: The Message of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 119/2, 2022.
Ravn, Ib. Beyond Chaos and Rigidity, Flexstability. New Ideas in Psychology. August 2022.
Romanczuk, Pawel and Bryan Daniels. Phase Transitions and Criticality in the Collective Behavior of Animals. arXiv:2211.03879.

Sanchez-Puig, Fernanda, et al. Heterogeneity Extends Criticality. arXiv.2208.06439. August 2022.
Sarkanych, Petro, et al. Network Analysis of the Kyiv Bylyny Cycle – East Slavic Epic Narratives. arXiv:2203.10399.
Shettigan, Nandan, et al. On the Biophysical Complexity of Brain Dynamics. Dynamics. 2/2, 2022.
Shishkov, Olga and Orit Peleg. Social Insects and Beyond: The Physics of Soft, Dense Invertebrate Aggregations. arXiv:2206.11129
Souza, Barbara, et al. Text Characterization Based on Recurrence Networks. arXiv:2201.06665.
Synder-Beattie, Andrew, et al. The Timing of Evolutionary Transitions Suggests Intelligent Life is Rare. Astrobiology. November, 2020.
Sormunen, Silja, et al. Critical Drift in a Neuro-Inspired Adaptive Network. arXiv:2206.10315.

Tadic, Bosiljka and Roderick Melnik. Self-Organized Critical Dynamics as a Key to Fundamental Features of Complexity in Physical, Biological and Social Networks. Dynamics. 2/2, 2022.
Teuscher, Christof. Revisiting the Edge of Chaos. Biosystems. May 2022.
Tomasello, Michael. The Evolution of Agency: Behavioral Organization from Lizards to Humans. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2022.
Tononi, Giulio, et al. Only What Exists can Cause: An Intrinsic View of Free Will. arXiv:2206.02069.
Toriumi, Shin and Vladimir Airapelian. Universal Scaling Laws for the Solar and Stellar Atmospheric Heating. arXiv:2202.01232.

Van der Kolk, Jasper, et al. Emergence of Geometric Turing Patterns in Complex Networks. arXiv:2211.11311
Vujovic, Filip, et al. Cellular Self-Organization: An Overdrive in Cambrian Diversity? BioEssays. July 2022.

Weiss, Lauren, et al. Architectures of Compact Multi-planet Systems. arXiv:2203.10076.
Wilkerson, Galen, et al. Spontaneous Emergence of Computation in Network Cascades. arXiv:2204.11956.
Wilson, Matt and Giulio, Chilibella. A Mathematical Framework for Transformations of Physical Processes. arXiv:2204.04319.
Wood, Charlie. How to Make the Universe Think for Us.. Quanta. June 1, 2022.
Wurthner, Laeschkir, et al. Bridging Scales in a Multiscale Pattern-Forming System. arXiv:2111.12043.

Yang, Vicky Chuqiao, et al. Scaling and the Universality of Function Diversity across Human Organizations. arXiv:2208.06487.

Zanin, Massimiliano and Johann Martinez. Analysing International Events through the Lens of Statistical Physics: The Case of Ukraine. arXiv:2203.07403.
Zimmern, Vincent. Why Brain Criticality is Clinically Revelant. Frontiers in Neural Circuits. August, 2020.
Zolyan, Suren. From Matter to Form: The Evolution of the Genetic Code as Semio-poiesis. Semiotica. March 2022.

Abitbol, M., et al. The Simons Observatory: Science Goals and Forecasts for the Enhanced Large Aperture Telescope. arXiv:2503.00636. We cite this entry with over 300 cosigners who make up the Simons Observatory Collaboration (see quote and website) as a good example of worldwise Earthuman endeavors which are lately able to fully explore and deeply quantify our vast temporal and spatial universe. See also The Atacama Cosmology Telescope: DR6 Maps at arXiv:2503.14451. As the ACT and JWST instruments send in their first year images and findings, they achieve a dramatic new dimension and detail of the earliest inflationary times and farthest galactic reaches. Via a philoSophia vista, our own global genius earns maybe an especial distinction by accomplishing a whole scale observational retrospective and recognition that a participatory ecosmos seems to require. Whom are we mindul Earthicans to gain all this awesome knowledge?

We describe scientific goals for the wide-field, millimeter-wave survey that will be achieved by the Simons Observatory (SO). Some of the science goals are to determine the physical conditions in the early universe; measure the integrated distribution of mass, electron pressure, and momentum; measure the distribution of galaxy groups and clusters; produce a sample of 30,000 galaxy clusters, and 100,000 extragalactic millimeter sources; and provide a new window into the transient universe on time scales of minutes to years. (Excerpts)

The Simons Observatory (SO) has completed the installation of its Large Aperture Telescope (LAT) near the summit of Cerro Toco in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile. The telescope joins the observatory’s Small Aperture Telescopes at the site. Together, they will collect the most precise measurements yet of the universe’s oldest light just after the universe’s birth. The high-fidelity SO data will be a unique window allowing scientists to learn about the primordial universe, neutrino physics, cosmological constant and dark energy, as well as galaxy evolution.

Princeton University Press Release New research by the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) collaboration has produced the clearest images yet of the universe's infancy. Measuring light that traveled for more than 13 billion years to reach a telescope high in the Chilean Andes, the new images reveal the universe when it was about 380,000 years old, the equivalent of hours-old baby pictures of a now middle-aged cosmos.

"Almost all of the helium in the universe was produced in the first three minutes of cosmic time," says Thibaut Louis, University Paris-Saclay and one of the lead authors of the new papers. "Our new measurements of its abundance agree very well with theoretical models and with observations in galaxies." The elements that we humans are made of—mostly carbon, with oxygen and nitrogen and iron and even traces of gold—were formed later in stars and are just a sprinkling on top of this cosmic stew.

"We've measured more precisely that the observable universe extends almost 50 billion light years in all directions from us, and contains as much mass as 1,900 'zetta-suns," or almost 2 trillion trillion suns," says Erminia Calabrese, professor of astrophysics at the University of Cardiff. Another 500 zetta-Suns of mass are mysterious dark matter.

Aguado, Ramon, et al. When matter and information merge into “Quantum.”. Communications Physics. September 22, 2023. Reviewed more in Mind/Matter, the note announces and surveys a huge global conference held in Madrid which could well stand as a major event and statement of an actual cocreativity this year. Yet we are betwixt past dark and future light ages, it is vital that such an alternative vision become evident.

Ahmed, Nafeez. “Planetary phase shift” as a new systems framework to navigate the evolutionary transformation of human civilization. Foresight. November 2024, . In this Emerald Insight journal, a British investigative journalist, author and academic contributes a rare composite, global overview by which to perceive a crucial transitional event. T

The paper advances futures study and practice by an example of a unified theoretical framework across a wide range of different ecological, social, political and economic systems. It proposes a new “collective forward intelligence” that can make sense of their trends as symptoms of a wider planetary sphere and to also construct plausible scenarios to underpin national and international decision-making. This study focusses on a transdisciplinary integration of C. S. Holling’s (search) adaptive environmental cycle with phase-transition phenomena across biology, physics and chemistry, applied on societal and civilizational scales. (Abstract)

Aschwanden, Martin. Power Laws in Astrophysics: Self-Organized Criticality Systems. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2025.. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2025. The author has studied observations and theoretical models of self-organized criticality systems for over 40 years as a researcher based at Lockheed Martin Solar and Astrophysics Laboratory. This latest edition follows his 2011 work Self-Organized Criticality in Astrophysics: Statistics of Nonlinear Processes in the Universe, along with many collegial projects and writings (search) before and after. For recent work see Universal Constants and Energy Integral in Self-Organized Criticality Systems at arXiv:2412.03481 (reviewed) and Testing the Universality of Self-Organized Criticality in Galactic, Extra-Galactic, and Black-Hole Systems at arXiv:2412.03499.

Research applications of complex systems and nonlinear physics are rapidly expanding across scientific disciplines. A common theme among them is the concept of “self-organized criticality systems”, which this volume presents for astrophysical phenomena such as solar flares, planetary systems, galactic and black-hole systems. The work explores why do power laws, self-organized criticality, an a universality actually exist? A highlight is a paradigm shift from microscopic concepts, such as cellular automaton algorithms, to macroscopic concepts formulated in terms of physical scaling laws.

Azarian, Bobby. The Romance of Reality: How the Universe Organizes Itself to Create Life, Consciousness and Cosmic Complexity. Dallas, TX: BenBella Books, 2022. The author is a science journalist with a neuroscience PhD from George Mason University, where he was a member of Harold Morowitz’s discussion group. His acknowledgements close with a quote (see below) from Harold’s The Emergence of Everything (2002) as an early glimpse of an epic 21st century revolution. In this prescient edition, Dr. Azarian provides a rare, insightful, wide-ranging survey to date. Three main sections, Origins, Evolution, and Transcendence, have chapters such as Our Cohesive Cosmic Story, Poetic Meta-Naturalism, the Biosphere is an Autocatalytic Set, Evolution is a Knowledge Creation Process, An Evolutionary Synthesis, A Unifying Theory of Reality and We are a Way for the Cosmos to Know Itself. A central theme is an animate presence of a universal self-organization which proceeds engender fractal-like scales of an emergent intricacy, organic beingness, and cognitive awareness. Here is a good glimpse so far which we seek to report and document. But a work remains to get on with it in this decade.

According to the prevailing scientific paradigm, the universe tends toward randomness; it functions according to laws without purpose, and the emergence of life is an accident devoid of meaning. But this bleak interpretation of nature is currently being challenged by novel findings at the intersection of physics, biology, neuroscience, and information theory. Generally known as “complexity science, it has led to new understandings of an oriented, emergent evolution. A revolutionary cosmic narrative is taking shape whereby simplest “parts” come together to form ever-greater “wholes” in a process that has no end in sight. (Publisher)

We are clearly at the beginning of viewing science from the new perspective of emergence. I believe that it will provide insights into the evolutionary unfolding of our universe, our solar system, our biota and our humanity. This essay will introduce some of the concepts that are coming into focus. The outlook is largely scientific, but certain philosophical and theological elements keep appearing. I offer no apology. (Harold Morowitz, The Emergence of Everything 2002)

(For myself, I first heard Harold in NYC in 1972 when his title was Biology as a Cosmological Imperative. I next met him at the Santa Fe Institute in 1987 where I asked if he would speak at an annual meeting of the American Teilhard Association, which he did in 1991. His 2016 opus with Eric Smith is The Origin and Nature of Life on Earth.)

So, the inevitable growth of knowledge and spread of adaptive complexity in the cosmos can be seen as a learning process that keeps life out of thermodynamic equilibrium. It arises from an evolutionary process that involves constant inferences and better iterations. (133) Our unifying theory of reality has made progress in understanding life’s origin, evolution and destiny. Now we are ready to ask what comes next in the grand process of cosmic self-organization. (243)

Because the universe has a built-in tendency to self-organize to an increasingly complex state, a collective purpose for intelligent life emerges from fundamental laws of nature. It is the teleological nature of the universe that creates a cosmic context that instills life with meaning and purpose, which is to suffuse the cosmos with intelligence. (275) The tendency to disorder by the second law is offset as life gains knowledge forever, giving us all an individual and collective purpose. As a result, we can aspire to live more meaningful lives, in harmony with one another and with the aspirations of nature. You are not a cosmic accident. You are a cosmic imperative. (279)

Ball, Philip. Organisms as Agents of Evolution: A New Research Review. templeton.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Biological-Agency_1_FINAL.pdf. The British science polyscholar posts a 40 page contribution in May to a Templeton subject Agency, Directionality and Function: Foundations for a Science of Purpose project. Its description (Google words) notes that into the 2020s, a new theoretic and evidential sense is in ascent, as not before, which views life’s long development from invertebrates to human cognizance as mainly due to innate proactive, self- and group serving behaviors. Short chapters herein include Agency as Autonomy, Thermodynamic Origins, Multicellular Collective Agency and Engineering and Ourselves. As this site records, other versions are autocatalytic, collectively intelligent, autopoietic self-maintenance. For example, prebiotic complexity (Egbert) seems to have its own motives, while a Bayesian theory occurs in physics (Fuchs). See also How Life Works: A User’s Guide to the New Biology by PB for his premier volume about life’s self-propelled quickening, cerebral evolution all the way to our observance and record. (November 2023)

Agency is the capacity to make goal-directed changes to one’s self and environment – seems to be a real and general characteristic of living organisms. Yet unlike other general features such as replication and metabolism, we lack widely accepted models or theories of what agency is and how it arises. Do modern biology and evolutionary theory need them? If so, what might they look like? (Introduction)

If agency does affect the trajectory of evolution, might it generate directionality to the overall process – giving evolution itself some goal or target? Can the agency of organisms, the objects of selection, produce at least the appearance of agency in evolution itself? In some sense it is uncontroversial that evolution possesses something resembling goals, for we see it in persistent convergence, where evolutionary lineages find their way to the same attractor states created by the environment along with the principles of physical law. By the same token, might the operation of agency conceivably create evolutionary attractors shaped by the internal nature of evolution itself? These are open questions. (28)

There is a strong case for considering agency to be a real property of most living organisms, and perhaps as a defining feature of life on a par with metabolism and self-replication. Yet if this is so, it remains unclear how it is to be defined and identified so that researchers can formulate and answer questions about living systems that cannot be addressed mechanistic approach like cognition and consciousness, it is probably not some single essence that living things contain in different amounts. (33)

Ball, Philip. Physicists Rewrite the Fundamental Law that Leads to Disorder. Quanta. May 26, 2022. In this significant article, the British polyscholar science writer surveys a rush of current advances which altogether well imply an historic revision of 19th century thermodynamic theories By a novel inclusion of quantum information qualities, the entropic demise implied by the second law from Ludwig Boltzmann (1877) can be set aside and moved beyond. This wide=ranging entry builds its case by enjoining the thought and writings of key contributors such as Chiara Marletto and David Deutsch (constructor theory), along with Vlatko Vedral, Gilad Gour, Markus Muller and others.

In addition quantum physicists such as Giulio Chiribella (search), Carlo Scandolo and Nicole Yunger Halpern provide insights based on relational aspects, resource computations, networks and more. Earlier work such as The Resource Theory of Informational Nonequilibrium in Thermodynamics by Gilad Gour, et al (1309.6586) and Quantum Resource Theories by Eric Chitambar and GG in Reviews of Modern Physics (91/025001, 2019) set the scene for Linear Growth of Quantum Circuit Complexity by Jonas Haferkamp, et al in Nature Physics (18/528, 2022), General Quantum Resource Theories by Kohdai Kuroiwa and Hayala Yamasaki (2002.02458), The First Law of General Quantum Resource Theories by Carlo Sparacian in Quantum (4/259, 2020), and Resource Theory of Quantum Uncomplexity by Nicole Yunger Halpern, et al (2110.11371).

The second law of thermodynamics is among the most sacred in all of science, but it has always rested on 19th century arguments about probability. New arguments trace its true source to the flows of quantum information. (Summary)

Yet physicists don’t just want descriptions of what will probably happen. Can the second law be tightened up into more than just a statement of likelihoods? A number of independent groups appear to have done just that. They have woven the second law out of the fundamental principles of quantum mechanics, which may have directionality and irreversibility built into them at the deepest level. According to this view, the second law comes about not because of classical probabilities but because of quantum effects such as entanglement. And it arises from from the most natural basis that we know of — the quantum resource of information. (1)

Crucially, the quantum informational approach suggests a way of getting rid of the statistical picture that bedevils the classical view, where you have to take averages over ensembles of many different microstates. “The true novelty with quantum information came with the understanding that one can replace ensembles with entanglement with the environment,” said Carlo Maria Scandolo of the University of Calgary. (5)

Quantum resource theories allow a kind of zooming in on the fine-grained details of the classical second law. We don’t need to think about huge numbers of particles; we can make statements about what is allowed among just a few of them. When we do this, said Nicole Yunger Halpern, it becomes clear that the classical second law is just a kind of coarse-grained sum of a whole family of inequality relationships. (6)

Bezgodov, Aleksandr and Konstantin Barezhev. The Origin of Planetary Ethics in the Philosophy of Russian Cosmism. UK: Xlibris, 2019. The Russian philosopher authors are General Director and Research Director of the Planetary Development Institute, which is based in Dubai. Into March 2022, it is timely that I came upon this erudite volume based on a deep native wisdom of these Eastern Slavic peoples. From the 1890s to the 1950s, this stellar school conceived an organic, numinous, feminine milieu which requires our human/Earth participation. (See George Young 2010 herein for a historic review.) The epochal endeavor was distinguished by contributors such as Nikolai Federov, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and Vladimir Vernadsky. Two chapters are Nikolai Umov: Anti-Entropy Ethics for Controlled Evolution and Ivan Efremov: Between Inferno and Harmony. An overall unitary, “panbiologic” animation and procreative destiny was traced from dark to light, relative chaos to order, with a quickening consciousness which peoples would spread across the galaxies.

As a later instances, I heard the systems scholar James G. Miller speak at MIT in 1984 when he said there was little USA interest in his work, but was often invited to Russia where thinkers wanted to hear about nested cellular connectivities. for a 2015 notice, the Russian-American cosmologist Andrei Linde (search) spoke about a people purpose to awaken and illume the celestial reaches. And the Biosystems journal edited by Abir Igamberdiev (Memorial University, Canada, search) seek to publish integral syntheses such as Autopoiesis: Foundations of Life, Cognition and Emergence.

But the prime motive of this visionary persuasion from V. Vernadsky, when he collaborated with P. Teilhard in Paris in the 1920s, to this present edition was to perceive our whole Earthsphere bioabide as a vital unitary center of cosmic cocreation. As the lead title advises, only an actual Planetary Ethics will save us. (As a sign of a global, noosphere civilization in place, I received this esoteric work from Amazon in two days.) Into March 2022, at the same while how absurd and tragic is it that an Armageddon-like conflagration rages and threatens to become a nuclear war.

This book seeks to formulate a Planetary Ethics as a moral basis and value code for a biocompatible, harmonious, and manageable civilization. Its essential content is extensively drawn Russian cosmists from the 1890s to the 1950s who made up this unique philosophical, scientific, and cultural phenomenon. By way of their joint planetary-cosmic consciousness, they developed a system of biocentric and humanistic values. Another facet was a spiritual rebellion of life against chaos, death, and limitation. The cosmists focused on a united humanity and a definitive relationship between human beings and a biouniverse still in the making. (Excerpt)

Bialek, William. Ambitions for theory in the physics of life. arXiv:2401.15538. The Princeton polyphysicist opens his 2024 entries with a review of 2023 presentations that he made at the Les Houches Summer School in the Swiss Alps (Google for annual programs). Search WB herein and arXiv.com preprint for several collegial contributions. As I gather and record into wider war October, along with other integral postings (Prokopenko, et al), it truly does seem that a revolutionary (family) reunion of universe and humanverse is finally becoming an actual reality. Into 2025 going forward, this is an awesome, historic achievement as our collective pediasphere comes to learn and discover on her/his own.

Theoretical physicists have been fascinated by the phenomena of life for more than a century. As we can presently engage more realistic descriptions of living systems, however, things get complicated. After reviewing different reactions to this complexity, I explore the optimization of information flow as a potentially general theoretical principle. The primary example is a genetic network guiding development of the fly embryo, but each idea also is illustrated by examples from neural systems. In each case, optimization makes detailed, largely parameter-free predictions that connect quantitatively with experiment.

This Summer School celebrates a special moment in the long history of interactions between physics and biology. Just one generation back, physicists and biologists thought that searching for a theoretical physics of life was a waste of time. Physicists saw biology as too messy, and biologists saw the physicists’ simplicity as a poor match to the complex diversity of life. Much has changed. Enormous progress in experiment has created a reproducibility far beyond what once was imagined. Thus, aspects of early embryonic development can take their place alongside classical examples such as photon counting in vision and molecule counting in bacterial chemotaxis. (63)

Bialek, William. Moving boundaries: An appreciation of John Hopfield.. arXiv:2412.18030.. As a junior colleague at Princeton with the new physics laureate for his initial 1982 conception of neural networks, this commentary first reminisces and then goes on to 2025 physics frontiers as it proceeds to realize an actual cognitive vitality

The 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton, "for foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks." As noted by the Nobel committee, their work moved the boundaries of physics. This is a brief reflection on Hopfield's work, its implications for the emergence of biological physics as a part of physics, the path from his early papers to the modern revolution in artificial intelligence, and prospects for the future. (Abstract)

What is physics? The central idea is that the world is understandable, that you should be able to take anything apart, understand the relationships between its constituents, do experiments, and on that basis be able to develop a quantitative understanding of its behavior. Physics was a point of view that the world around us is, with effort, ingenuity, and adequate resources, understandable in a predictive in quantitative fashion. (10)

Bowick, Mark, et al. Symmetry, Thermodynamics and Topology in Active Matter. Physical Review X. February, 2022. This is an invited perspective review of a 2020 Kavli Conference with this title by Kavli Institute, UC Santa Barbara, MIT and Indian Institute of Science physicists. Two coauthors are Cristina Marchetti and Sriram Ramaswamy who were the main founders of this scientific notice of how particulate materials (e.g., colloids, bacteria) in both organic and inorganic media tend to self-organize into complex, dynamic forms. As a COVID remote meeting, many more authorities could present their work. Now ten years on, it is strongly evident that a common, robust spontaneity serves to vivify natural phenomena everywhere.

The Active Matter phrase refers to any collection of entities that individually use free energy to generate their own motion and forces. Through interactions, active particles spontaneously organize into emergent large-scale structures. This self-organizing paradigm is now applied to living and nonliving systems from subnuclear structures in the cell to collective motion at the human scale. The diverse phenomena they exhibit all stem from a dynamic assembly of discrete components that dissipatively break time-reversal symmetry. Here we review an array of current and emerging research directions as physical materiality, broadly conceived, comes to life. (Abstract, excerpt)

Today, the name active matter refers to any collection of entities that individually use free energy to generate their own motion and forces. Through interactions, these active particles spontaneously organize in emergent large-scale structures with a rich range of materials properties. The defining property of an active system is that the energy input is out of equilibrium, whether internal or created by contact with a proximate surface, acts individually and independently on each “active particle.” (1, 2)

The field of active matter was born from the physicist’s ambition to use statistical physics and hydrodynamics to describe collective motion in the living world. The active-matter framework has now had important successes in capturing examples of organization in living matter on scales from subnuclear to oceanic. (19)

Bruckner, David and Gasper Tkacik. Bruckner, David and Gasper Tkacik. Information content and optimization of self-organized developmental systems.. PNAS. 121/23, 2024. Institute of Science and Technology (ITSA), Austria physicists introduce a novel framework to study self-organized, reaction-diffusion patterning as a stochastic dynamical system. As the quotes say, their proof of principle is the way cells form, migrate and combine in. embryonic development. See also then Waves, patterns, bifurcations: the vertebrate segmentation clock by Paul Francois and Victoria Mochulska in Physics Reports (Volume 1080, 2024) and Precise and scalable self-organization in mammalian pseudo-embryos by Melody Merle and Leah Friedman in Nature Structural & Molecular Biology. (31/896, 2024) for similar, concurrent reports of the same theoretical basis.

Altogether this year, along with many other entries, our 21st century, 2020s prodigious revolution has reached a robust wide and deep observance of a phenomenal universe to pediaverse catalytic spontaneity which now seems to require its own aware, selective realization. An awesome consequence then accrues for our Earthuman observance. We valiant, survivor peoples may well be the actual SELVES whom altogether are meant to respectfully take up, vitalize, engender and continue to arrange a universal procreativity.

Development relies on the ability of cells to self-organize into patterns of different cell types that underlie the formation of tissues and organs. But how to generically quantify the patterning performance of different biological self-organizing systems has remained unclear. Here, we develop an information-theoretic framework to analyze a wide range of models of self-organization. Our approach can be used to define the information content of observed patterns, assess the importance of regulatory motifs, and predict optimal operating regimes for self-organizing systems. In regard, this framework achieves a unifying mathematical language to describe the actual presence of biological self-organization across diverse systems. (Significance)

Self-organizing patterning processes generate, transmit, transform, and distribute information in space and time. Much as physics equips us with a formalism to describe how the flows of matter take shape, information theory provides a formal language to quantify statistical structures. This approach has previously been applied to formalize the notion of “positional information” in developmental systems, where inputs are the maternally provided morphogen gradients. However, for self-organizing patterns a more general approach is needed to quantify their information content. Here, we address this challenge by proposing an information-theoretic measure of self-organization performance in embryonic development. (2)

New mathematical framework sheds light on how cells communicate to form an embryo
Biological processes depend on puzzle pieces coming together and interacting. Interestingly, the mammalian embryo develops similarly. In nature, self-organization is all around us: We can observe it in fish schools, bird flocks, or insect collectives, and even in microscopic processes regulated by cells. "Information theory is a universal language to quantify structure and regularity in statistical ensembles, which are a collection of replicates of the same process. Embryonic development can be seen as such a process that reproducibly generates functional organisms that are very similar but not identical," says Gašper Tkaèik, professor at ISTA and expert in this field. (ITSA News)

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