Biological arrow of time: emergence of tangled information hierarchies and self-modelling dynamics
We study open-ended evolution by focusing on computational and information-processing dynamics underlying major evolutionary transitions. In doing so, we consider biological organisms as hierarchical dynamical systems that generate regularities in their phase-spaces through interactions with their e...
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| Main Authors: | , , , , , , , , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
IOP Publishing
2025-01-01
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| Series: | Journal of Physics: Complexity |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://doi.org/10.1088/2632-072X/ad9cdc |
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| Summary: | We study open-ended evolution by focusing on computational and information-processing dynamics underlying major evolutionary transitions. In doing so, we consider biological organisms as hierarchical dynamical systems that generate regularities in their phase-spaces through interactions with their environment. These emergent information patterns can then be encoded within the organism’s components, leading to self-modelling ‘tangled hierarchies’. Our main conjecture is that when macro-scale patterns are encoded within micro-scale components, it creates fundamental tensions (computational inconsistencies) between what is encodable at a particular evolutionary stage and what is potentially realisable in the environment. A resolution of these tensions triggers an evolutionary transition which expands the problem-space, at the cost of generating new tensions in the expanded space, in a continual process. We argue that biological complexification can be interpreted computation-theoretically, within the Gödel–Turing–Post recursion-theoretic framework, as open-ended generation of computational novelty. In general, this process can be viewed as a meta-simulation performed by higher-order systems that successively simulate the computation carried out by lower-order systems. This computation-theoretic argument provides a basis for hypothesising the biological arrow of time. |
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| ISSN: | 2632-072X |