III. Ecosmos: A Revolutionary Fertile, Habitable, Solar-Bioplanet, Incubator Lifescape

C. The Information Computation Turn

Information Theoretic Foundations for Physics.. www.perimeterinstitute.ca/conferences/information-theoretic-foundations-physics. A site for this Perimeter Institute, Ontario, week-long conference in May 2015. Its synopsis below could be a good summary of the physics paradigm, or lack thereof, which may be remedied by this Turing turn. Among the 22 men and no women speakers are Gerard ‘t Hooft, Lee Smolin, and Giulio Chiribella, so this is a big event.

In the last few decades, there has been a growing consensus that information theory is of fundamental importance for theoretical physics. The information paradigm has yielded successes in many different areas of the foundations of physics, including the development and application of quantum information theory, Jacobson’s thermodynamic derivation of the Einstein equations, the black-hole information paradox, Jaynes’ maximum entropy principle, or operational approaches to the foundations of quantum mechanics.

Parallel to this fruitful development, there is a growing number of physicists who endorse the general attitude that fundamental physics may need new foundations or at least a new perspective. Despite amazing recent successes, there remains the profound challenge that experiments have not confirmed many of the recent theoretical ideas: the universe seems simpler than our ideas of unification predicted. Information-theoretic approaches can provide a starting point, which is exceptionally careful in the assumptions that it makes, and broad in its applicability, since it does not rely on specific laws of motion or formal properties of underlying theories. (Synopsis)

The Science of Information: From Language to Black Holes. www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/the-science-of-information-from-language-to-black-holes. This Great Course online offering is taught by Benjamin Schumacher, a Kenyon College physicist. The 24 lectures span The Transformability of Information to The Meaning of Information, #14 and 23 noted below, to cover the gamut from quantum computation to electronic circuits. But the description cites a universe to human reality suffused with this quality but still stuck in a mechanical insignificance. This is the current quandary and paradigm shift that confounds us and must be resolved.

The science of information is the most influential, yet perhaps least appreciated field in science today. Never before in history have we been able to acquire, record, communicate, and use information in so many different forms. Never before have we had access to such vast quantities of data of every kind. This revolution goes far beyond the limitless content that fills our lives, because information also underlies our understanding of ourselves, the natural world, and the universe. It is the key that unites fields as different as linguistics, cryptography, neuroscience, genetics, economics, and quantum mechanics. And the fact that information bears no necessary connection to meaning makes it a profound puzzle that people with a passion for philosophy have pondered for centuries.

14. DNA, RNA, and the protein molecules they assemble are so interdependent that it's hard to picture how life got started in the first place. Survey a selection of intriguing theories, including the view that genetic information in living cells results from eons of natural computation. 23. Physicist John A. Wheeler's phrase "It from bit" makes a profound point about the connection between reality and information. Follow this idea into a black hole to investigate the status of information in a place of unlimited density. Also explore the information content of the entire universe!

Adamatzky, Andrew, et al. East-West Paths to Unconventional Computing. Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology. Online August, 2017. A paper for a forthcoming issue on a whole world bicameral scientific wisdom wherein a notable array of computational philosophers, see below, offer personal views upon a natural reality which in some way arises from a mathematic informative program. The Contributors are listed below, for example we cite Causality in Complexity by H. Zenil, Persian Philosophy by M. M. Dehshibi, Three Steps by S. Stepney, and Cooperation in Rebellion by C. Calude. Some words by S. Akl, Queen’s University, Ontario, may form a capsule.

A paper for a forthcoming issue on a whole world bicameral scientific wisdom wherein a notable array of computational philosophers, see below, offer personal views upon a natural reality which in some way arises from a mathematic informative program. The Contributors are listed below, for example we cite Causality in Complexity by H. Zenil, Persian Philosophy by M. M. Dehshibi, Three Steps by S. Stepney, and Cooperation in Rebellion by C. Calude. Some words by S. Akl, Queen’s University, Ontario, may form a capsule.

Adami, Christoph. The Evolution of Biological Information: How Evolution Creates Complexity, from Viruses to Brains. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2024. A senior authority in computational biology for over 20 years based at Michigan State University contributes his unique, 600 page opus. Its comprehensive chapters flow from the subject theory to biotic precursors, its genetic prescription, digital lab experiments, physiologic robustness, RNA origins, all the way to ascendant intelligence and social cooperation. As these aspects unfold in thorough turn they are braced by many equations.

An overall course becomes evident from the earliest replicants to metabolic biomolecules, cellular animals and relative linguistic knowledge. Although not a theme, it does trace a central trend that winds up with our sentient, observant selves. While Caleb Scharf and Yavul Harari write of algorithms that pass on from the human phase, for Adami the plot thickens and quickens as life’s genomic heredity proceeds from simple cells to neural cognizance. By 2024, a temporal progression may come into view of a procreative ecosmos were trying to decipher and read its own hereditary endowment.

In this final chapter I discussed three prime scales of life: how information is the key element that distinguishes life from nonlife, how the communication of information is the main factor that makes cooperation possible from cells to societies and how information is used to predict the future state of the world. Just as I wrote in the chapter introduction, once we look at biology in the light of information, it is hard not to see the fundamental importance of this concept. (519)

In this book, Christoph Adami adds a 21st century perspective to Darwinian evolution through the lens of an informational quality. This novel theoretical stance sheds light on how cells evolve to communicate, intelligence arises and viruses evolve drug resistance, By this account, information emerges as the central unifying principle which allows us to think about the origin of life on Earth and elsewhere. A leader in the field of computational biology, Adami especially considers the information theory of biomolecules and its content in genetic sequences and proteins. After viewing bacteria and digital organisms, he goes onto explain cooperation among cells, animals, and people. (MIT)

Christoph Adami is professor of microbiology and molecular genetics at Michigan State University. A pioneer in the application of methods from information theory to the study of evolution, he designed the Avida system that launched the use of digital life as a tool for investigating basic questions in evolutionary biology.

Adami, Christoph. The Use of Information Theory in Evolutionary Biology. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences. Vol. 1256/49, 2012. The Michigan State University computational scientist advances the perception that what life is about, what is going on from proteins to people, is most of all informational and communicative in kind. By this view the rise of animate complexity can be tracked by relative abilities to learn, process, and integrate knowledge. Might we then consider tracing the other way to a vital conducive cosmos which may take on the guise of a textual genomic-like source?

In this review, I focus on two uses of information theory in evolutionary biology: First, the quantification of the information content of genes and proteins and how this information may have evolved along the branches of the tree of life. Second, the evolution of information-processing structures (such as brains) that control animals, and how the functional complexity of these brains (and how they evolve) could be quantified using information theory. The latter approach reinforces a concept that has appeared in neuroscience repeatedly: the value of information for an adapted organism is fitness, and the complexity of an organism’s brain must be reflected in how it manages to process, integrate, and make use of information for its own advantage. (50)

Information is the central currency for organismal fitness, and appears to be that which increases when organisms adapt to their niche. Information about the niche is stored in genes, and used to make predictions about the future states of the environment. Because fitness is higher in well-predicted environments (simply because it is easier to take advantage of the environment’s features for reproduction if they are predictable), organisms with more information about their niche are expected to outcompete those with less information, suggesting a direct relationship between information content and fitness within a niche. (62)

Aerts, Diederik, et al. From Quantum Cognition to Conceptuality Interpretation II. arXiv:2412.19809. Vrije Universiteit Brussels and University of Udine, Italy continue to finesse their innovative theories as by which quantum-like phenomena is seen in effect in psychological, social and literary domains. See also The physics and metaphysics of the conceptuality interpretation of quantum mechanics by Aerts, D. and Sassoli de Bianchi, M. at arXiv:2310.10684 for an earlier edition and The cognitive triple-slit experiment at arXiv:2505.05497 for a latest version.

An overview of the conceptuality interpretation of quantum mechanics is presented, along with how it sheds light on key quantum and relativistic phenomena. We propose that it clarifies Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, entanglement-based nonlocality, superposition, delayed choice experiments, quantum measurements and more. Finally, we suggest that it outlines the intellectual trajectory leading from applications of quantum notions to human cognition. This article is the second in a two-part series whereof the first is 2412.06799. (Excerpt)

Ananthaswamy, Anil. The Evolution of Reality. www.fqxi.org/community/articles. A posting on this Foundational Questions Institute site on November 10, 2009 about the quantum information speculations of LANL physicist Wojciech Zurek, as Verdral below also, draw much from John Archibald Wheeler. If you go on to click Community and Articles, a wide array of views appear, such as “The Crystallizing Universe” by Kate Becker, that yet languish in a material, insensate cosmos knowable only from remote, arcane domains, rather than as an organic, universe to human emergence.

Ananthaswamy, Anil. Why Machines Learn: The Elegant Math Behind Modern AI. New York: Dutton, 2024. The veteran science expositor provides a most comprehensive discourse from its historic origins such as Gottfied Leibniz’s alphabets, algebra/calculus and more onto late 20th century digital/analog algorithmic computations and into the 2020s its radical AI neural net, large language, ChatGPT information phase. By way of an ecosmos vista then, it could well seem that such a participatory cocreation may be trying to pass its whole genetic-like operating system to our Earthuman prodigy going forward.

Arrighi, Pablo and Jonathan Grattage. The Quantum Game of Life. Physics World. June, 2012. As a “digital cosmos” cover story, University of Grenoble “quantum information scientists” report that views of the physical universe as due to a computational process have grown and matured into a major theoretical approach. Precursors are John Archibald Wheeler’s famous It from Bit,, John Conway’s Game of Life, Stephen Wolfram’s cellular automata, and lately Seth Lloyd, Ed Fredkin, and Lee Smolin, search arXiv for an increasing number of advocates. As Vlatko Verdal and others contend, an informational reconception of quantum theory is much in order. A & G note that such a generative program implies an “intrinsic universality” since the same natural code would run everywhere. As the tangled string theory multiverse implodes, this 21st century doubleness, albeit still mechanical, is on the wane to take its place.

The idea that our universe can be modelled as a giant computer dates back to the 1970s. But as Pablo Arrighi and Jonathan Grattage describe, quantum-information theorists are now hoping to revitalize this idea by making the "digital physics" project compatible with quantum theory. (23) Digital physicists, for their part, are like characters in a video game who are desperately trying to understand the rules. (24)

In other words, if the rule of a particular quantum cellular automaton is complex enough, then it can simulate all other quantum cellular automata. A quantum cellular automaton that can perform such a simulation is said to have intrinsic universality, a concept we have developed in the quantum setting. Hence, if we can find the simplest intrinsically universal rule for a quantum cellular automaton, we can use it to find the simplest and most “natural” (in the sense of how nature does it) way of implementing or simulating physical phenomena. (26)

Auletta, Gennaro. Cognitive Biology: Dealing with Information from Bacteria to Minds. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Reviewed more in Current Vistas, a huge contribution to this whole information and intelligence revolution.

Bartlett, Stuart, et al. The Physics of Life: Exploring Information as a Distinctive Feature of Living Systems.. arXiv:2501.08683. A global array of biotheorists composed of SB, California Institute of Technology, Andrew Eckford, York University, Matthew Egbert, University of Auckland, Manasvi Lingam, Florida Institute of Technology, Artemy Kolchinsky, Universitat Pompeu Fabra and Adam Frank, Gourab Ghoshal, University of Rochester provide mid-decade appreciations of the central role that an encoded knowledge resource seems to play in life’s metabolic essence and oriented emergence These consummate insights are then set within the rising evolutionary view of proactive organisms distinguished by their self-making, intelligent behavioral agencies

This paper explores the idea that information is an essential feature of living systems as they acquire, process, and gain knowledge about their environments to sustain themselves and achieve intrinsic goals. In particular, we view the transition to information-driven systems as a key step in abiogenesis, planetary habitability, and exoplanet biosignatures. By integrating theoretical and experimental approaches, this perspective advances our understanding of life's generative dynamics and universal principles. (Excerpt)

Bates, Marcia. Information and Knowledge: An Evolutionary Framework for Information Science. Information Research. 10/4, 2005. The UCLA professor of information studies is a main spokesperson for 21st century understandings of these cognitive and societal qualities, as they seem to grow in natural significance. She often contributes essays in regard for reference works such as the Encyclopedia of Library and Information Sciences, check her copious Publications webpage. This article includes an extensive survey and bibliography to date.

Argument. Information 1 is defined as the pattern of organization of matter and energy. Information 2 is defined as some pattern of organization of matter and energy that has been given meaning by a living being. Knowledge is defined as information given meaning and integrated with other contents of understanding. Elaboration. The approach is rooted in an evolutionary framework; that is, modes of information perception, processing, transmission, and storage are seen to have developed as a part of the general evolution of members of the animal kingdom. Conclusion. Thus, rather than being reductionist, the approach taken demonstrates the fundamentally emergent nature of most of what higher animals and human beings, in particular, experience as information.

The Evolutionary Context. All these differentiations, clusterings and bunchings of matter and energy present in the universe can be the subject of animals' perceptions and interactions with the world, whether with animals, plants, rocks, i.e., matter, or with waves of sound or waves of the earth in an earthquake, i.e., energy. Animals are able to detect and process those differentiations in the universe and experience them as patterns of organization. (7) Surely, it enriches our understanding in information science to begin with this basic understanding of information, then see how this elemental definition contributes to ever-more-sophisticated understandings of patterns of organization, of information, in animal and human lives. (10)

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