--- abstract: | This paper discusses the benefits of describing the world as information, especially in the study of the evolution of life and cognition. Traditional studies encounter problems because it is difficult to describe life and cognition in terms of matter and energy, since their laws are valid only at the physical scale. However, if matter and energy, as well as life and cognition, are described in terms of information, evolution can be described consistently as information becoming more complex. The paper presents five tentative laws of information, valid at multiple scales, which are generalizations of Darwinian, cybernetic, thermodynamic, and complexity principles. These are further used to discuss the notions of life and cognition and their evolution. altloc: - http://arxiv.org/abs/0704.0304 chapter: ~ commentary: ~ commref: ~ confdates: 'October 28-November 2, 2007' conference: International Conference on Complex Systems 2007 confloc: 'Boston, MA, USA' contact_email: ~ creators_id: [] creators_name: - family: Gershenson given: Carlos honourific: Dr lineage: '' date: 2007 date_type: published datestamp: 2007-08-30 department: ~ dir: disk0/00/00/56/89 edit_lock_since: ~ edit_lock_until: ~ edit_lock_user: ~ editors_id: [] editors_name: [] eprint_status: archive eprintid: 5689 fileinfo: /style/images/fileicons/application_pdf.png;/5689/1/WorldAsInfo.pdf full_text_status: public importid: ~ institution: ~ isbn: ~ ispublished: inpress issn: ~ item_issues_comment: [] item_issues_count: 0 item_issues_description: [] item_issues_id: [] item_issues_reported_by: [] item_issues_resolved_by: [] item_issues_status: [] item_issues_timestamp: [] item_issues_type: [] keywords: 'information, evolution, matter, energy, life, cognition' lastmod: 2011-03-11 08:56:57 latitude: ~ longitude: ~ metadata_visibility: show note: ~ number: ~ pagerange: ~ pubdom: TRUE publication: ~ publisher: ~ refereed: TRUE referencetext: |+ Adami, C. (1995). Self-organized criticality in living systems. Phys. Lett. A 203: 29–32. URL http://arxiv.org/abs/adap- org/9401001. Adami, C. (2002). What is complexity? Bioessays 24 (12) (December): 1085–1094. URL http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/bies.10192. Adami, C. and Brown, C. T. (1994). Evolutionary learning in the 2d artificial life system ”Avida”. In Proc. Artificial Life IV, R. Brooks and P. Maes, (Eds.). MIT Press, pp. 377–381. URL http://arxiv.org/abs/adap- org/9405003. Ashby, W. R. (1956). An Introduction to Cybernetics. Chapman & Hall, London. URL http://pcp.vub.ac.be/ASHBBOOK.html. Atlan, H. (1974). On a formal definition of organization. J Theor Biol 45 (2) (June): 295–304. Atlan, H. and Cohen, I. R. (1998). Immune information, self-organization and meaning. Int. Im- munol. 10 (6): 711—717. Bak, P., Tang, C., and Wiesenfeld, K. (1987). Self-organized criticality: An explanation of the 1/f noise. Phys. Rev. Lett. 59 (4) (July): 381–384. URL http://dx.doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.59.381. Barandarian, X. (2004). Behavioral adaptive autonomy. a milestone in the ALife route to AI? In Artificial Life IX Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on the Simulation and Synthesis of Living Systems, J. Pollack, M. Bedau, P. Husbands, T. Ikegami, and R. A. Watson, (Eds.). MIT Press, pp. 514– 521. URL http://tinyurl.com/24m3z7. Bedau, M. A. (1998). Four puzzles about life. Artificial Life 4: 125–140. URL http://tinyurl.com/3a59sy. Cohen, I. R. (2000). Tending Adam’s Garden: Evolving the Cognitive Immune Self. Academic Press, London. Cohen, I. R. (2006). Informational landscapes in art, science, and evolution. Bul letin of Mathematical Biology 68 (5) (July): 1213–1229. URL http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11538- 006-9118-4. Cover, T. M. and Thomas, J. A. (2006). Elements of Information Theory. Wiley-Interscience. URL http://www.elementsofinformationtheory.com/. Darwin, C. (1998). The Origin of Species. Wordsworth. URL http://tinyurl.com/24srqy. De Duve, C. (2003). Live Evolving: Molecules, Mind, and Meaning. Oxford University Press. Dennett, D. (1995). Darwin’s Dangerous Idea. Simon & Schuster. Farmer, J. D. and Zamani, N. (2006). Mechanical vs. informational components of price impact. Tech. Rep. 06-09-034, Santa Fe Institute. URL http://tinyurl.com/2gln6x. Floridi, L., Ed. (2003). The Blackwel l Guide to Philosophy of Computing and Information. Blackwell. URL http://tinyurl.com/262qww. Gershenson, C. (2004a). Cognitive paradigms: Which one is the best? Cognitive Systems Research 5 (2) (June): 135–156. URL http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cogsys.2003.10.002. Gershenson, C. (2004b). Introduction to random Boolean networks. In Workshop and Tutorial Pro- ceedings, Ninth International Conference on the Simulation and Synthesis of Living Systems (ALife IX), M. Bedau, P. Husbands, T. Hutton, S. Kumar, and H. Suzuki, (Eds.). Boston, MA, pp. 160–173. URL http://uk.arxiv.org/abs/nlin.AO/0408006. Gershenson, C. (2007). Design and control of self-organizing systems. Ph.D. thesis, Vrije Universiteit Brussel. URL http://ecco.vub.ac.be/%7Ecarlos/thesis.pdf. Gershenson, C. and Heylighen, F. (2003). When can we call a system self-organizing? In Advances in Artificial Life, 7th European Conference, ECAL 2003 LNAI 2801, W. Banzhaf, T. Christaller, P. Dittrich, J. T. Kim, and J. Ziegler, (Eds.). Springer-Verlag, pp. 606–614. URL http://uk.arxiv.org/abs/nlin.AO/0303020. G ̈ornerup, O. and Crutchfield, J. P. (2008). Hierarchical self-organization in the finitary pro- cess soup. Artificial Life In Press. Special Issue on the Evolution of Complexity. URL http://tinyurl.com/266j3w. Helbing, D. and Vicsek, T. (1999). Optimal self-organization. New Journal of Physics 1: 13.1–13.17. URL http://tinyurl.com/yxwftj. Heylighen, F. and Joslyn, C. (2001). Cybernetics and second order cybernetics. In Encyclopedia of Physical Science and Technology , 3rd ed., R. A. Meyers, (Ed.). Vol. 4. Academic Press, New York, 155– 170. Hopfield, J. J. (1994). Physics, computation, and why biology looks so different. Journal of Theoretical Biology 171: 53–60. URL http://dx.doi.org/10.1006/jtbi.1994.1211. Kauffman, S. A. (1993). The Origins of Order. Oxford University Press. Kauffman, S. A. (2000). Investigations. Oxford University Press. Klyubin, A. S., Polani, D., and Nehaniv, C. L. (2004). Organization of the information flow in the perception-action loop of evolved agents perception-action loop of evolved agents. In Proceedings of 2004 NASA/DoD Conference on Evolvable Hardware, R. S. Zebulum, D. Gwaltney, G. Hornby, D. Keymeulen, J. Lohn, and A. Stoica, (Eds.). IEEE Computer Society, pp. 177–180. URL http://tinyurl.com/2x7kl6. Klyubin, A. S., Polani, D., and Nehaniv, C. L. (2007). Representations of space and time in the maximization of information flow in the perception-action loop. Neural Computation 19: 2387–2432. URL http://tinyurl.com/2zoacc. Krakauer, D. C. and Zanotto, P. M. A. (2007). Viral individuality and limitations of the life concept. In Protocel ls: Bridging Nonliving and Living Matter, S. Rasmussen, M. A. Bedau, L. Chen, D. Deamer, D. C. Krakauer, N. Packard, and D. P. Stadler, (Eds.). MIT Press. Langton, C. (1990). Computation at the edge of chaos: Phase transitions and emergent computation. Physica D 42: 12–37. Martyushev, L. M. and Seleznev, V. D. (2006). Maximum entropy production princi- ple in physics, chemistry and biology. Physics Reports 426 (1) (April): 1–45. URL http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.physrep.2005.12.001. McMullin, B. (2004). 30 years of computational autopoiesis: A review. Artificial Life 10 (3) (Summer): 277–295. URL http://www.eeng.dcu.ie/ ∼ alife/bmcm- alj- 2004/. McShea, D. W. (1996). Metazoan complexity and evolution: Is there a trend? Evolution 50: 477–492. URL http://tinyurl.com/37acj5. Michod, R. E. (2000). Darwinian Dynamics: Evolutionary Transitions in Fitness and Individuality. Prince- ton University Press, Princeton, NJ. Miconi, T. (2008). Evolution and complexity: the double-edged sword. Artificial Life In Press. Special Issue on the Evolution of Complexity. Moreno, A. and Ruiz-Mirazo, K. (2006). The maintenance and open-ended growth of complexity in nature: information as a decoupling mechanism in the origins of life. In Reframing Complexity: Per- spectives from the North and South, F. Capra, A. Juarrero, P. Sotolongo, and J. van Uden, (Eds.). ISCE Publishing. URL http://isce.edu/Reframing Complexity. Morowitz, H. and Smith, D. E. (2006). Energy flow and the organization of life. Tech. Rep. 06-08-029, Santa Fe Institute. URL http://tinyurl.com/2keh7c. Prokopenko, M., Boschetti, F., and Ryan, A. J. (2007). An information-theoretic primer on complexity, self-organisation and emergence. Advances in Complex Systems In Press. URL http://www.worldscinet.com/acs/editorial/paper/5183631.pdf. Prokopenko, M., Gerasimov, V., and Tanev, I. (2006). Evolving spatiotemporal coordination in a modular robotic system. In From Animals to Animats 9: 9th International Conference on the Simulation of Adaptive Behavior (SAB 2006), S. Nolfi, G. Baldassarre, R. Calabretta, J. C. T. Hallam, D. Marocco, J.-A. Meyer, O. Miglino, and D. Parisi, (Eds.). Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 4095. Springer, pp. 558–569. Ray, T. S. (1991). An approach to the synthesis of life. In Artificial Life II, C. Langton, C. Taylor, J. D. Farmer, and S. Rasmussen, (Eds.). Santa Fe Institute Studies in the Sciences of Complexity, vol. XI. Addison-Wesley, Redwood City, CA, 371–408. Roederer, J. G. (2005). Information and its Role in Nature. Springer-Verlag, Heidelberg. Ruiz-Mirazo, K. and Moreno, A. (2004). Basic autonomy as a fundamnental step in the synthesis of life. Artificial Life 10 (3) (Summer): 235–259. Shalizi, C. R. (2001). Causal architecture, complexity and self-organization in time series and cellular automata. Ph.D. thesis, University of Wisconsin at Madison. URL http://tinyurl.com/v3lho. Shannon, C. E. (1948). A mathematical theory of communication. Bel l System Technical Journal 27: 379–423 and 623–656. URL http://tinyurl.com/6qrcc. Stewart, J. (1995). Cognition = life : Implications for higher-level cognition. Behavioural processes 35: 311–326. URL http://tinyurl.com/25qddt. Umpleby, S. (2004). Physical relationships among matter, energy and information. In Cybernetics and Systems 2004, R. Trappl, (Ed.). Vol. 1. Austrian Society for Cybernetic Studies, Vienna, pp. 124–6. URL http://tinyurl.com/q2vfl. Varela, F. J., Maturana, H. R., and Uribe., R. (1974). Autopoiesis: The organization of living systems, its characterization and a model. BioSystems 5: 187–196. von Baeyer, H. C. (2004). Information: The New Language of Science. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. URL http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/VONINF.html. von Uexk ̈ull, J. (1957). A stroll through the worlds of animals and men. In Instinctive Behavior: The Development of a Modern Concept, C. H. Schiller, (Ed.). International Universities Press, New York, 5–80. Wheeler, J. A. (1990). Information, physics, quantum: the search for links. In Complexity, Entropy, and the Physics of Information, W. H. Zurek, (Ed.). Santa Fe Institute Studies in the Sciences of Complexity, vol. VIII. Perseus Books, Reading, MA. Wittgenstein, L. (1999). Philosophical Investigations , 3rd ed. Prentice Hall. Wolfram, S. (2002). A New Kind of Sciene. Wolfram Media. URL http://www.wolframscience.com/. relation_type: [] relation_uri: [] reportno: ~ rev_number: 13 series: ~ source: ~ status_changed: 2007-09-18 02:52:11 subjects: - comp-sci-complex-theory - bio-evo - phil-epist succeeds: 5486 suggestions: This is a thoroughly revised and improved version after substantial feedback sword_depositor: ~ sword_slug: ~ thesistype: ~ title: The World as Evolving Information type: confpaper userid: 3228 volume: ~