emergent property
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2021 ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
Yunus A. Çengel

A novel theory of life is proposed and its implications on the viruses and the future robots are discussed. The universal laws of physics are inferred phenomena that originate from the observed regularity in the physical realm. An apparent distinct feature of living beings compared to the nonliving ones is the presence of a higher level of regularity, which is indicative of a supplemental set of governing laws within the sphere of life. In this article a living or animate being is defined concisely as a natural entity whose internal changes and external behavior cannot be predicted by the universal laws and forces of physics alone at all times. Everything else is nonliving or inanimate. Likewise, life is defined as a supplemental set of laws and influences that act over a confined space which constitutes the domain of life, superimposed on the universal laws and forces of physics. Also, life is shown to be a field phenomenon like a quantum field, except that life pervades a bounded region rather than the entire spacetime. It is argued that life is an agency with causal power rather than an ordinary emergent property, and that a virus qualifies as a living being. The proposed field theory of life predicts that the future robots are unlikely to acquire life, and that the notion of highly intelligent future robots posing an existential threat to humanity is, in all likelihood, an illusion.


2021 ◽  
pp. 165-179
Author(s):  
Jason Brennan

This chapter addresses theoretical and empirical objections that critics have presented against the epistemic argument for democracy presented in the previous chapter (the argument from collective wisdom). The objections this chapter addresses include those based on the average voter’s alleged incompetence and systematic biases, as well as those that challenge the relevance of deductive arguments for democracy. The metrics by which political scientists and economists claim to measure voters’ incompetence are elitist and the argument “garbage in, garbage out” on which people like Brennan rely to criticize democracy fail to take into account the fact that collective intelligence is not a linear function of individual competence but an emergent property that crucially depends on group properties, including cognitive diversity, and thus not captured by Brennan’s purely individualistic framework. Inferring from individual input to collective outcomes is thus neither empirical nor demonstrative. Systematic biases would be, and often are, a problem for democracy but not more than for oligarchies of knowers. In a free and diverse public sphere the public and its democratic representatives have more opportunities to debias themselves, at least over time, than small groups of homogenously thinking elites.


2021 ◽  
pp. 11-21
Author(s):  
Franklin M. Harold

Cells are composed of molecules that are lifeless but special, because most of them occur in nature only in the context of life. They are essential to all the workings of life, and no one single class holds life’s secret: life is an emergent property of the collective of molecules, assembled into the elaborate structures called cells. Cells come in great profusion, but all are variations on just two patterns of organization: prokaryotes, small and relatively simple microbes, both Bacteria and Archaea; and eukaryotes (Eukarya), the larger and more complex cells that make up all animals, plants, and fungi. The molecules of life, for all their diversity, again fall mainly into just a handful of categories. The bulk of living matter consists of proteins, nucleic acids, carbohydrates and lipids. Biomolecules belong to chemistry, but their functions in the process of living place them in the realm of biology.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kishore Hari ◽  
Varun Ullanat ◽  
Archana Balasubramanian ◽  
Aditi Gopalan ◽  
Mohit Kumar Jolly

Elucidating the principles of cellular decision-making is of fundamental importance. These decisions are often orchestrated by underlying regulatory networks. While we understand the dynamics of simple network motifs, how do large networks lead to a limited number of phenotypes, despite their complexity, remains largely elusive. Here, we investigate five different networks governing epithelial-mesenchymal plasticity and identified a latent design principles in their topology that limits their phenotypic repertoire - the presence of two 'teams' of nodes engaging in a mutually inhibitory feedback loop, forming a toggle switch. These teams are specific to these networks and directly shape the phenotypic landscape and consequently the frequency and stability of terminal phenotypes vs. the intermediary ones. Our analysis reveals that network topology alone can contain information about phenotypic distributions it can lead to, thus obviating the need to simulate them. We unravel topological signatures that can drive canalization of cell-fates during diverse decision-making processes.


2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (Supplement_1) ◽  
pp. 384-384
Author(s):  
Linda Fried ◽  
Véronique Legault ◽  
Karen Bandeen-Roche ◽  
Nancy Presse ◽  
Pierrette Gaudreau ◽  
...  

Abstract Despite its widespread presence in older adults, frailty etiology is still unclear, being associated with dysregulation in diverse physiological systems. Here, we show evidence that frailty emerges from broad loss of homeostasis integrated through complex systems dynamics. Using the NuAge and WHAS cohorts, we calculated Mahalanobis distance-based physiological dysregulation in six systems and tested the breadth, diffuseness, and nonlinearity of associations between frailty and system-specific dysregulation. We found clear support for breadth of associations, but only partial support for diffuseness and nonlinearity: 1) physiological dysregulation is positively associated with frailty in many or all systems, depending on analyses; 2) the number of dysregulated systems or the total amount of dysregulation are more predictive than individual systems, but results only partially replicated across cohorts; 3) dysregulation trends are exponential, but not always significant. These results suggest, but do not fully prove, that frailty is an emergent property of complex systems dynamics.


2021 ◽  
pp. 27-30
Author(s):  
Oshin Vartanian ◽  
Anjan Chatterjee

Following the rapid growth of neuroaesthetics, there was a need to systematize and organize the findings into a coherent and testable framework. With the “aesthetic triad,” the authors presented a model according to which aesthetic experience was viewed as the emergent property of the interaction of three large-scale systems in the brain: sensory-motor, emotion-valuation, and knowledge-meaning. Features that distinguished this model from others was that it was meant to apply to all aesthetic episodes (e.g., art, faces, architecture, etc.) and it acknowledged explicitly that a large variety of aesthetic experiences can emerge as a function of the specific ways in which these systems interact in the course of their emergence. To probe the model, the contribution of the knowledge-meaning system is likely of greatest interest, at least in part because that system encapsulates a large breadth of factors ranging from the personal to the cultural.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles H Cannon ◽  
Gianluca Piovesan ◽  
Sergi Munne-Bosch

Trees can live many centuries with sustained fecundity and death is largely stochastic. We use a neutral stochastic model to examine the demographic patterns that emerge over time, across a range of population sizes and empirically observed mortality rates. A small proportion of trees (~1% at 1.5% mortality) are life-history lottery winners, achieving ages >10-20x median age. Maximum age increases with bigger populations and lower mortality rates. One quarter of trees (~24%) achieve ages that are 3-4 times greater than median age. Three age classes (Mature, Old, and Ancient) contribute unique historical diversity across complex environmental cycles. Ancient trees are an emergent property of forests that requires many centuries to generate. They radically change generation time variance and population fitness, bridging infrequent environmental cycles. These life-history lottery winners are vital to future forest dynamics and invaluable data about environmental history and individual longevity. Old-growth forests contain trees that cannot be replaced through restoration or regeneration in the near future. They simply must be protected to preserve their unique diversity.


2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (9) ◽  
pp. 316-330
Author(s):  
Y. V. Subba Rao

The proposed hypothesis of ‘Stars in the Origin and Evolution of Species’ is based on the principle underlying in ‘Jyotish’, one of the six Vedāngas and ancillary of most ancient Vedas of Hinduism. The principle of interaction of electromagnetic force with inorganic chemistry available to us in the universe defines life as an emergent property of matter and as the most plausible hypothesis for explaining the extra-terrestrial origin of species. The current hypothesis of evolution explains the critical milestones in the development of advanced life on Earth during the Cambrian explosion and the complexity of life when humans appeared on earth endowed with a brain of extraordinary intellectual capacities and capabilities which is far more complex than the animal brain and its development in stages is also observed as a plausible mechanism in tune with the phases of elements given out by the stars during their life cycles.


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