Paper updated: The World as Evolving Information

The proceedings of ICCS2007 will be published soon, I believe that as a volume in the Springer "Understanding Complex Systems" series. With this excuse, I updated this paper with three more laws of information, two new classifications, and further discussions. Any feedback is more than welcome.

Gershenson, C. (In Press). The World as Evolving Information. To be published in Proceedings of ICCS 2007.

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 eight tentative laws of information, valid at multiple scales, which are generalizations of Darwinian, cybernetic, thermodynamic, psychological, philosophical, and complexity principles. These are further used to discuss the notions of life, cognition and their evolution.

Full paper: http://arxiv.org/abs/0704.0304

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