Books

Short works

Books : reviews

Sara Imari Walker, Paul C. W. Davies, George F. R. Ellis, eds.
From Matter to Life: information and causality.
CUP. 2017

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