Bücher der Reihe The Frontiers Collection

This collection of prize-winning essays addresses the controversial question of how meaning and goals can emerge in a physical world governed by mathematical laws. What are the prerequisites for a system to have goals? What makes a physical process into a signal? Does eliminating the homunculus solve the problem? The three first-prize winners, Larissa Albantakis, Carlo Rovelli and Jochen Szangolies tackle exactly these challenges, while many other aspects (agency, the role of the observer, causality versus teleology, ghosts in the machine etc.) feature in the other award winning contributions. All contributions are accessible to non-specialists.These seventeen stimulating and often entertaining essays are enhanced versions of the prize-winning entries to the FQXi essay competition in 2017.The Foundational Questions Institute, FQXi, catalyzes, supports, and disseminates research on questions at the foundations of physics and cosmology, particularly new frontiers and innovative ideas integral to a deep understanding of reality, but unlikely to be supported by conventional funding sources.

This book explores the role of exaptation in diverse areas of life, with examples ranging from biology to economics, social sciences and architecture.

This book addresses the current challenges of sustainable development, including its social, economic and environmental components.

Wittgenstein replied, "Well, what would it have looked like if it had looked as though the Earth was rotating?" What would it have looked like if we looked at all sciences from the viewpoint of Wittgenstein's philosophy?

Einstein once remarked "After a certain high level of technical skill is achieved, science and art tend to coalesce in aesthetics, plasticity, and form.

For a brief time in history, it was possible to imagine that a sufficiently advanced intellect could, given sufficient time and resources, in principle understand how to mathematically prove everything that was true.

Most of us are intuitively familiar with small social systems, such as families and soccer teams. The book aims to explain, illustrate, and model the unique and fascinating nature of small (social) systems by relying on deep scientific foundations and by using examples from sport, movies, music, and the martial arts.

This book explores the role of exaptation in diverse areas of life, with examples ranging from biology to economics, social sciences and architecture.

This highly interdisciplinary book, covering more than six fields, from philosophy and sciences all the way up to the humanities and with contributions from eminent authors, addresses the interplay between content and context, reductionism and holism and their meeting point: the notion of emergence. Much of today's science is reductionist (bottom-up); in other words, behaviour on one level is explained by reducing it to components on a lower level. Chemistry is reduced to atoms, ecosystems are explained in terms of DNA and proteins, etc. This approach fails quickly since we can't cannot extrapolate to the properties of atoms solely from Schrodinger's equation, nor figure out protein folding from an amino acid sequence or obtain the phenotype of an organism from its genotype. An alternative approach to this is holism (top-down). Consider an ecosystem or an organism as a whole: seek patterns on the same scale. Model a galaxy not as 400 billion-point masses (stars) but as an object in its own right with its own properties (spiral, elliptic). Or a hurricane as a structured form of moist air and water vapour. Reductionism is largely about content, whereas holistic models are more attuned to context. Reductionism (content) and holism (context) are not opposing philosophies - in fact, they work best in tandem. Join us on a journey to understand the multifaceted dialectic concerning this duo and how they shape the foundations of sciences and humanities, our thoughts and, the very nature of reality itself.

It has been suggested that the big questions of science are answered ¿ that science has entered a ¿twilight age¿ where all the important knowledge is known and only the details need mopping up. And yet, the unprecedented progress in science and technology in the twentieth century has raised qu- tions that weren¿t conceived of a century ago. This book argues that, far from being nearlycomplete, the storyof sciencehas many morechapters,yet unwritten. With the perspective of the century¿s advance, it¿s as if we have climbed a mountain and can see just how much broader the story is. Instead of asking how an apple falls from a tree, as Isaac Newton did in the17thcentury,wecannowask:Whatisthefundamentalnatureofanapple (matter)? How does an apple (biological organism) form and grow? Whence came the breeze that blew it loose (meteorology)? What in a physical sense (synaptic ?rings) was the idea that Newton had, and how did it form? A new approach to science that can answer such questions has sprung up in the past 30 years. This approach ¿ known as nonlinear science¿ismore than a new ?eld. Put simply, it is the recognition that throughout nature, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Unexpected things happen.

It is not restricted to plants growing from seed or animals developing from an embryo (although these do supply the most abundant examples) but also addresses kindred processes, from inorganic to social to biomorphic technology.

How does consciousness emerge from a brain that consists only of physical matter and electrical / chemical reactions? The deep mysteries of consciousness have plagued philosophers and scientists for thousands of years. This book approaches the problem through scientific studies that shed light on the neural mechanism of consciousness, and furthermore, delves into the possibility of artificial consciousness, a phenomenon that may ultimately solve the mystery. Finally, two key suggestions made in the book, namely, a method to test machine consciousness and a theory hypothesizing that consciousness emerges from a neural algorithm, reveal a novel and credible pathway to mind-uploading.The original Japanese version of this book has become a best-seller in popular neuroscience and has even led to a neurotech startup for mind-uploading.

This wide-ranging book introduces information as a key concept not only in physics, from quantum mechanics to thermodynamics, but also in the neighboring sciences and in the humanities. The central part analyzes dynamical processes as manifestations of information flows between microscopic and macroscopic scales and between systems and their environment. Quantum mechanics is interpreted as a reconstruction of mechanics based on fundamental limitations of information processing on the smallest scales. These become particularly manifest in quantum chaos and in quantum computing. Covering subjects such as causality, prediction, undecidability, chaos, and quantum randomness, the book also provides an information-theoretical view of predictability. More than 180 illustrations visualize the concepts and arguments. The book takes inspiration from the author's graduate-level topical lecture but is also well suited for undergraduate studies and is a valuable resource for researchers and professionals.