What is an individual? Information theory may provide the answer
Apr 2020, phys.org
via the Santa Fe Institute:
The information theory of individuality (or ITI) describes emergent agency at different scales and with distributed communication networks.The researchers look to structured information flows between a system and its environment, seeing the individual in terms of "dynamical processes and not as stationary objects".Their model balances self-regulation and environmental influence at different levels from environmentally-scaffolded forms like whirlpools, to partially-scaffolded colonial forms like coral reefs and spider webs, to organismal individuals that are sculpted by their environment but strongly self-organizing.Each is a strategy for propagating information forward through time."Individuality is about temporal uncertainty reduction."
image credit: Larry Goeb - Totem Smoke - lgflickr1
Post Script:
Perhaps the biggest implication of this work is in how it places the observer at the center of evolutionary theory. "Just as in quantum mechanics," Krakauer says, "where the state of a system depends on measurement, the measurements we call natural selection dictate the preferred form of the individual. Who does the measuring? What we find depends on what the observer is capable of seeing." [link]
Notes:
David Krakauer et al. The information theory of individuality, Theory in Biosciences (2020). DOI: 10.1007/s12064-020-00313-7
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