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

C. The Information Computation Turn

Joosten, Joost. Complexity Fits the Fittest. Zelinka, Ivan, et al, eds. How Nature Works: Complexity in Interdisciplinary Research and Applications. Berlin: Springer, 2014. The University of Barcelona logician is affiliated with the Algorthmic Nature group of the Paris-based Laboratory for Scientific Research for the Natural and Digital Sciences. By a general application of Stephen Wolfram’s cellular automata, the real presence a generative computational source in effect prior to selection can now be theoretically explained. This chapter, and a companion paper “On the Necessity of Complexity,” are available on the arXiv website.

In this paper we shall relate computational complexity to the principle of natural selection. We shall do this by giving a philosophical account of complexity versus universality. It seems sustainable to equate universal systems to complex systems or at least to potentially complex systems. Post’s problem on the existence of (natural) intermediate degrees then finds its analog in the Principle of Computational Equivalence (PCE). In this paper we address possible driving forces—if any—behind PCE. Both the natural aspects as well as the cognitive ones are investigated. We postulate a principle GNS that we call the Generalized Natural Selection principle that together with the Church-Turing thesis is seen to be in close correspondence to a weak version of PCE. Next, we view our cognitive toolkit in an evolutionary light and postulate a principle in analogy with Fodor’s language principle. (Complexity Fits the Fittest)

Wolfram's Principle of Computational Equivalence (PCE) implies that universal complexity abounds in nature. This paper comprises three sections. In the first section we consider the question why there are so many universal phenomena around. So, in a sense, we seek a driving force behind the PCE if any. We postulate a principle GNS that we call the Generalized Natural Selection Principle that together with the Church-Turing Thesis is seen to be equivalent to a weak version of PCE. In the second section we ask the question why we do not observe any phenomena that are complex but not-universal. We choose a cognitive setting to embark on this question and make some analogies with formal logic. In the third and final section we report on a case study where we see rich structures arise everywhere. (On the Necessity of Complexity)

Kari, Lila and Grzegorz Rozenberg. The Many Facets of Natural Computing. Communications of the ACM. 51/10, 2008. Kari, Canada Research Chair in Biocomputing, University of Western Ontario, and Rozenberg, pioneer Leiden University information philosopher offer an illistrated paean to the theoretical vista that “Nature is computation.” By so doing, a cross-fertilization accrues whence perceptions of a dynamic natural “software” can in turn inspire more viable computer capabilities. Prime instances via computational systems biology are “genomic computers,” gene regulatory and biochemical networks, transport and cellular computing, interactive organisms, and so on. These cases, for example, can infer computational immune systems, particle swarm optimization, and onto membrane, molecular, or quantum computing. See also Rozenberg’s chapter “Computer Science, Informatics, and Natural Computing” in Cooper, Barry, et al, eds. New Computational Paradigms (Springer, 2008).

Keller, Evelyn Fox. Towards a Science of Informed Matter. Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences. 42/2, 2011. The MIT philosopher of science picks up on the insights of Chemistry laureate Jean-Marie Lehn (search) in support of a growing sense that nature’s materiality is not inert but suffused with prescriptive information. An inherent “non-equilibrium dynamics” is thus at work, so as to infer a “molecular informatics.” By these encounters, if one might allow a creative, organic universe, could these abstractions be actually trying to express a natural parent to child genetic code?

Over the last couple of decades, a call has begun to resound in a number of distinct fields of inquiry for a reattachment of form to matter, for an understanding of 'information' as inherently embodied, or, as Jean-Marie Lehn calls it, for a "science of informed matter." We hear this call most clearly in chemistry, in cognitive science, in molecular computation, and in robotics-all fields looking to biological processes to ground a new epistemology. (174)

Khrennikov, Andrei. Towards Information Lasers. Entropy. Online October, 2015. The prolific Linnaeus University physicist continues his project, with many colleagues, to reconceive quantum phenomena in terms of an intrinsic communicative quality. The article is also a good entry to this 21st century fundamental revolution.

In our modeling, the notion of information is a primary notion, which is not definable with the aid of more fundamental notions, such as probability. Such an approach matches various purely-informational approaches to physics celebrated in Wheeler’s statement: “It from bit. Otherwise put, every ‘it’, every particle, every field of force, even the space-time continuum itself derives its function, its meaning, its very existence entirely - even if in some contexts indirectly from the apparatus-elicited answers to yes-or-no questions, binary choices, bits. ‘It from bit’ symbolizes the idea that every item of the physical world has at bottom—a very deep bottom, in most instances—an immaterial source and explanation; that which we call reality arises in the last analysis from the posing of yes no questions and the registering of equipment-evoked responses; in short, that all things physical are information-theoretic in origin and that this is a participatory universe.” (6975)

Kitazono, Jun, et al. Efficient Algorithms for Searching the Minimum Information Partition in Integrated Information Theory. Entropy. 20/3, 2018. As this IIT approach (Tononi) whence consciousness is seen to rise in tandem with relative knowledge content grows in acceptance, Kitazono, Araya, Inc., Tokyo, Ryota Kanai, Kobe University, and Masafumi Oizumi (search), RIKEN Brain Science Institute, Hiroshima press its technical advance via algorithms and neural nets by which to better analyze and apply. See also concurrent papers Measuring Integrated Information by Pedro Mediano, et al at arXiv:1806.09373, and Integrated Information in the Thermodynamic Limit by Miguel Aguilera and Exequiel Di Paolo at 1806.07879. A good entry to ITT is What is Consciousness? by co-theorist Christoph Koch in Scientific American for June 2018.

The ability to integrate information in the brain is considered to be an essential property for cognition and consciousness. Integrated Information Theory (IIT) hypothesizes that the amount of integrated information in the brain is related to the level of consciousness. (Abstract)

Knuth, Kevin. Information-Based Physics: An Observer-Centric Foundation. Contemporary Physics. Online January, 2014. The SUNY Albany professor of physics and informatics continues the inspiration of John Archibald Wheeler that this existent reality is in some way founded upon and most distinguished by a communicative source and conveyance. Such a self-visualizing and activating cosmos then requires at a later point the presence of sentient observers to recognize, acknowledge, and so bring into full being. Knuth has a series of prior papers on arXiv such as The Physics of Events: A Potential Foundation for Emergent Space-Time. While they, and most theoretical papers, are written in a technical parlance, the point of the message could be that human beings are in fact significantly empowered and entitled to learn, discover, witness and self-select.

It is generally believed that physical laws, reflecting an inherent order in the universe, are ordained by nature. However, in modern physics the observer plays a central role raising questions about how an observer-centric physics can result in laws apparently worthy of a universal nature-centric physics. Over the last decade, we have found that the consistent apt quantification of algebraic and order-theoretic structures results in calculi that possess constraint equations taking the form of what are often considered to be physical laws. The result is an approach to foundational physics where laws derive from both consistent descriptions and optimal information-based inferences made by embedded observers. (Abstract excerpt)

It is generally believed that physical laws reflect an inherent order in the universe. These laws, thought to apply everywhere, are typically considered to have been ordained by nature. In this sense they are universal and nature-centric. However, in the last century, modern physics has placed the observer in a central role resulting in an observer-based physics, which with a potential for subjectivity as well as quantum contextuality, poses conceptual difficulties for reconciliation with a nature-based physics. This raises questions as to precisely how an observer-based physics could give rise to consistent universal laws of nature as well as what role information plays in physics. Perhaps the potential implication of such questions has never been so clearly and concisely put as in Wheeler’s aphorism “It from Bit.” (1)

Landaure, Rolf. The Physical Nature of Information. Physics Letters A. 217/188, 1996. An historic paper by the German-American, IBM Research Center, physicist which established the concept that something else and more is going on than just material in motion. It is here that early claims of “quantum information,” along with “quantum parallelism and analog computation” are entered.

Lingam, Manasvi, et al. Planetary Scale Information Transmission in the Biosphere and Technosphere: Limits and Evolution. arXiv:2309.07922. ML, Florida Institute of Technology, Adam Frank, University of Rochester and Amedeo Balbi, University of Rome astroscholars provide insightful suggestions to better serve our future searches for advanced, neighbor exoworlds. In regard, they propose this natural and human knowledgeable, communicative quality can be a prime indicator of their presence. Once more, in still another view, this immaterial, implicate feature can well define the central course of life, mind and personal procreativity.

Information transmission via communication between agents is ubiquitous on Earth, and is a vital facet of living systems. In this paper, we aim to quantify this rate of information transmission associated with Earth's biosphere and technosphere (i.e., a measure of global information flow) by means of a heuristic order-of-magnitude model. By adopting ostensibly conservative values for the salient parameters, we estimate that the global information transmission rate for the biosphere might be ∼1024 bits/s, and that it may perhaps exceed the corresponding rate for the current technosphere by ∼9 orders of magnitude. However, under the equivocal assumption of sustained exponential growth, we find that information transmission in the technosphere can potentially surpass that of the biosphere ∼90 years in the future, reflecting its increasing dominance.

It is widely accepted that information processing constitutes a fundamental aspect of life. In this “informational” realm, the significance and ubiquity of information transmission between organisms/agents via appropriate communication channels is thoroughly documented, ranging from microscopic to macroscopic scales and spanning multiple modalities. A number of authors have hypothesized that exploring information transmission via communication might be valuable for understanding various major evolutionary events in Earth’s history. The proposals have ranged from abiogenesis and early evolution of (proto)life to breakthroughs in cooperation, collective behavior, multicellularity and cognition. (1, 2)

Linson, Adam, et al. The Active Inference Approach to Ecological Perception: General Information Dynamics for Natural and Artificial Embodied Cognition. Frontiers in Robotics and AI. Online March, 2018. In this paper with many views, senior British neuroscientists and philosophers Linson, Andy Clark, Subramanian Ramamoorthy and Karl Friston continue to voice their future oriented, anticipatory model of neural activity. In other words, our brains are most occupied with and distinguished by trying to figure out what happens next, and by referral to prior memory how to respond. The technical paper courses through physical thermodynamics, self-organizing systems, embodiment, adaptations, and onto complex spatial/temporal integration so to express a universe to human evolution which seems to be engaged with and bent on its own successful recognition. OK

The emerging neurocomputational vision of humans as embodied, ecologically embedded, social agents who shape and are shaped by their environment offers an opportunity to revisit ideas about the physical and information-theoretic underpinnings of life, mind, and consciousness itself. In particular, the active inference framework (AIF) makes it possible to bridge connections from computational neuroscience and robotics/AI to ecological psychology and phenomenology, revealing common underpinnings and overcoming limitations. AIF opposes the mechanistic and reductive, while staying grounded in a naturalistic and information-theoretic foundation, using the principle of free energy minimization. This approach allows a unified treatment of particles, organisms, and interactive machines, spanning from the inorganic to organic, non-life to life, and natural to artificial agents. (Abstract edits)

Lizier, Joseph. JIDT: An Information-Theoretic Toolkit for Studying the Dynamics of Complex Systems. arXiv:1408.3270. We note this contribution by the University of Sydney researcher because it describes these ubiquitous nonlinear networks as most distinguished by their conveyance of an informational content. By such an attribution, nature’s universal self-organizational propensities seem to take on a genetic identity.

Complex systems are increasingly being viewed as distributed information processing systems, particularly in the domains of computational neuroscience, bioinformatics and Artificial Life. This trend has resulted in a strong uptake in the use of (Shannon) information-theoretic measures to analyse the dynamics of complex systems in these fields. We introduce the Java Information Dynamics Toolkit (JIDT): a Google code project which provides a standalone, (GNU GPL v3 licensed) open-source code implementation for empirical estimation of information-theoretic measures from time-series data. While the toolkit provides classic information-theoretic measures (e.g. entropy, mutual information, conditional mutual information), it ultimately focusses on implementing higher-level measures for information dynamics. (Abstract excerpt)

Lloyd, Seth. Programming the Universe. New York: Knopf, 2006. The MIT ‘quantum mechanic’ writes his book, which illustrates a deep dichotomy in physics. The main difference pertains to the presence and activity of information. As opposed to approaches such as string theory or loop quantum gravity which do not include information as a prime actor, Lloyd could be placed in the digital universe camp, populated by Stephen Wolfram, Gregory Chaitin and others, who hold that an original and constant algorithmic program is at work to generate an increasing, animate complexity. (One could also mention Eric Baum and Richard Watson.) This view adds another aspect akin to an elemental software which applies over and over as the cosmos computes itself.

But a philosophical lapse boggles all these takes, for this is not the scientist’s issue. Life is still a “quantum accident,” people have no special place or purpose, we are “computational clay.” We are also in a quandary. The pursuit of natural philosophy is given up because postmodernism has concluded there is no extant nature to philosophize about. An obvious need exists to sort all this out. In this website, we propose a bicameral humankind, with a feminine vista, to figure out what kind of universe this is and who we are. In translation, we are each trying to explain the genotype and phenotype of a cosmic genesis.

This book advocates a new paradigm, an extension of the powerful mechanistic paradigm: I suggest thinking about the world not simply as a machine, but as a machine that processes information. In this paradigm, there are two primary quantities, energy and information, standing on an equal footing and playing off each other. (169) The primary consequence of the computational nature of the universe is that the universe naturally generates complex systems, such as life. Although the basic laws of physics are comparatively simple in form, they give rise, because they are computationally universal, to systems of enormous complexity. (176)

Lloyd, Seth. The Digital Universe. Physics World. November, 2008. Reviewed at length in Quantum Cosmology as a synopsis of this computational school.

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