My Notes: Table of Contents
1. All information transfer is digital. (Qubits collapse to bits under transfer).
Particle-less Universe.
2. Natural selection is a digital process. (noisy digital processes can look analog).
3. Natural selection can be viewed in terms of information transfer. The 2nd Law.
4. Different views of 2nd Law. and confusions.
Shannon etc.
We tend to look the wrong way at information flow because of the teleological illusion.
Plus we tend to look the wrong way at it because of the teleological illusion.”>The Entropy Sign.
5. The order of life requires a fairly stable energy flow. Low level disruption causes mutation which allows for natural selection, high level disruption causes extinction, the phenotype or extended phenotype (change to the environment) caused by a low level disruption that causes a big change (punctuated equilibrium style) can itself cause a big disruption even if slef regulated complex environments (gaia) are the norm (there is no benign gaia). The distribution of these events follows a power law.
Anti-Gaia
6. All complex system interactions follow macroscopic power law energy transfer relationships even if the ‘clock rate’ and mutation rate is relatively constant.
There is a common thread between fractals, mappings (feedback) and such power law distributions, they ppeal in all sorts of unlikely places. Fractals.
7. (CF Kauffman’s adjacent possible) do systems self configure for maximum overall increase in entropy (information flow)? i.e. living things are quite the opposite of a challenge to the 2nd law, they are a manifestation of its acceleration. Turbulence.
8. Memetics is real, natural selection of living things is a special case of memetics, rather than memetics being a product of sophisticated language producing living things (a by product of the extended phenotype).
9, A CA with a finite boundary constitutes and a random cycling through rules, constitutes a model of a system under which natural selection can and will operate. The one tuning factor is the rule fidelity or cycle rate. (If there is some feedback mechanism for this tuning factor itself, then natural selection will self emerge)Information flow in one 2 state 3 color cellular automata can create a universal turing machine. A mutation rate which cycles through the rules of the CA will eventually produce a universal CA which in turn will be able to produce complex adaptive systems via natural selection.
Cellular Automata.
Crackpot Ideas.
Self Evolving CA.
Wolfram.
10. Living things are one type of persistent order that self emerges in energy flows (or entropy gradients, if you like), below life there are things like weather features and whirlpools, life itself can be broken into different categories (e.g. self aware systems have some kind of internal model of themselves and are structurally different, perhaps) these can be classified diagrammatically. A whirlpool is an unstable replicator that re-emerges spontaneously in the right conditions, because it is simple (it is no a descendent of a previous whirlpool).
A systems language.
Maynard Smith - life classification.
11. The function of a gene or more generally ‘meme’ is specific to a particular living thing and its environment, it is a somewhat arbitrary categorization (one gene may do multiple things, different things in different situations and a single DNA elements may be part of more than one gene). The arguments about the reality of memes could apply to genes but memes are made of bits, just as genes are made of DNA bases.
Evolution - meme notes
12. Rabbit hole stuff - are the bits themselves relative.
Information sync vs. transfer
Lee Smolin’s Hunch.
Other notes, to filter:
Entropy and Large Scales and entropy confusion
History of entropy - flesh out.
History of Chaos theory - flesh out.
General Notes.
My notes on Kauffman.
More Kauffman.
Semantic problems concerning information.
Tangential, re-read: information-equation-of-state-for-universe.
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July 30th, 2010 at 11:12 pm
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