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.
Contents
- Introduction to "Matter and Life". 2017
- Sara Imari Walker, Paul C. W. Davies. The “Hard Problem” of Life. 2017
- Chiara Marletto. Beyond Initial Conditions and Laws of Motion: Constructor Theory of Information and Life. 2017
- Anne-Marie Grisogono. (How) Did Information Emerge?. 2017
- Jillian E. Smith-Carpenter, Sha Li, Jay T. Goodwin, Anil K. Mehta, David G. Lynn. On the Emerging Codes for Chemical Evolution. 2017
- Denis Noble. Digital and Analogue Information in Organisms. 2017
- Christoph Adami, Thomas Labar. From Entropy to Information: Biased Typewriters and the Origin of Life. 2017
- David C. Krakauer. Cryptographic Nature. 2017
- Steven Weinstein, Theodore P. Pavlic. Noise and Function. 2017
- David H. Wolpert, Eric Libby, Joshua A. Grochow, Simon Dedeo. The Many Faces of State Space Compression. 2017
- Hector Zenil, Angelika Schmidt, Jesper Tegnér. Causality, Information, and Biological Computation: An Algorithmic Software Approach to Life, Disease, and the Immune System. 2017
- Jessica Flack. Life's Information Hierarchy. 2017
- Keith D. Farnsworth, George F. R. Ellis, Luc Jaeger. Living through Downward Causation: From Molecules to Ecosystems. 2017
- Larissa Albantakis, Giulio Tononi. Automata and Animats: From Dynamics to Cause–Effect Structures. 2017
- Karola Stotz, Paul E. Griffiths. Biological Information, Causality, and Specificity: An Intimate Relationship. 2017
- Simon Dedeo. Major Transitions in Political Order. 2017
- Michael Wibral, Joseph Lizier, Viola Priesemann. Bits from Brains: Analyzing Distributed Computation in Neural Systems. 2017
- G. Andrew D. Briggs, Dawid Potgieter. Machine Learning and the Questions It Raises. 2017