Remembering the Future

Life expresses both function and sign systems. This parallels the logically necessary symbolic self-referring structure in self-reproducing systems. Due to the abstract character of function and sign systems, life is not a subsystem of natural laws. This suggests that our reason is limited in respect to solving the problem of the origin of life and that we are left accepting life as an axiom.

Topics: Meaning | life | logic | evolution

Labels: evolution, life, logic, meaning

Who assigns this metadata, and why do they do it? You have three choices: people who do it because they're paid to, people who do it because they want to, and automated processes.

. . .

While some metadata is free, such as the size of a file and the last time it was edited, creation of new metadata is never completely free. If you're not paying people outright, you must come up with and then implement some system that makes people want to do your metadata data entry without being paid.

. . .

if it doesn't make your life more fun, it better do something to make your life easier. Coming up with that incentive is the real silver bullet, if you want to avoid writing a check for human labor or automated systems to do this work for you.

Topics: metadata | meaning

Labels: meaning, Metadata

Animals and especially insects are usually seen as complex robots which only respond to external stimuli," says senior author Björn Brembs from the Free University Berlin. They are assumed to be input-output devices. "When scientists observe animals responding differently even to the same external stimuli, they attribute this variability to random errors in a complex brain." Using a combination of automated behavior recording and sophisticated mathematical analyses, the international team of researchers showed for the first time that such variability cannot be due to simple random events but is generated spontaneously and non-randomly by the brain. These results caught computer scientist and lead author Alexander Maye from the University of Hamburg by surprise: "I would have never guessed that simple flies who otherwise keep bouncing off the same window have the capacity for nonrandom spontaneity if given the chance.

...

The fly's behavior is controlled by brain circuits which operate as a nonlinear system with unstable dynamics far from equilibrium.

...

Only after the team analyzed the fly behavior with methods developed by co-authors George Sugihara and Chih-hao Hsieh from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego did they realize the origin of the fly's peculiar spontaneity. "We found that there must be an evolved function in the fly brain which leads to spontaneous variations in fly behavior" Sugihara said. "The results of our analysis indicate a mechanism which might be common to many other animals and could form the biological foundation for what we experience as free will".

Topics: Meaning | FreeWill

Labels: FreeWill, meaning

Life is universally understood to require a source of free energy and mechanisms with which to harness it. Remarkably, the converse may also be true: the continuous generation of sources of free energy by abiotic processes may have forced life into existence as a means to alleviate the buildup of free energy stresses.

. . .

A deterministic emergence of life would reflect an essential continuity between physics, chemistry, and biology. It would show that a part of the order we recognize as living is thermodynamic order inherent in the geosphere, and that some aspects of Darwinian selection are expressions of the likely simpler statistical mechanics of physical and chemical self-organization.

Topics: Evolution | Meaning

Labels: evolution, life, meaning

Search/Filter/Select/Show related

Rich metadata, simple data tables, REST processes

Topics: Representation | Meaning | Metadata

Labels: meaning, Metadata, Representation