From Matter to Life: Information and Causality

Cambridge University Press, 2/23/2017
EAN 9781107150539, ISBN10: 1107150531

Hardcover, 514 pages, 22.8 x 15.2 x 4.3 cm
Language: English

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.

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.