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Life as we know it

Karl Friston · 3 Jul 2013

Read the paper on pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov ↗

4 korrents from this paper ↓

Near this, by wording

Papers whose claims are worded most like this one's, found by the same hourly pass that draws the map. It is a measure of LANGUAGE, not of agreement or of citation: two papers can be near each other here and flatly contradict one another.

Karl Friston did not write this page.

Every claim below was made in this piece, quoted word for word and numbered in the order the piece makes them, so you can read it there rather than take our word for it. The sentence above each quote is our reading of the claim, not their wording. Each quote was checked against a stored copy of the page at build time; where the two differ, the quote is the fact.

  1. Our reading

    Life may be an inevitable, emergent property of any random dynamical system with a Markov blanket.

    Their wordsThis paper presents a heuristic proof (and simulations of a primordial soup) suggesting that life—or biological self-organization—is an inevitable and emergent property of any (ergodic) random dynamical system that possesses a Markov blanket.

  2. Our reading

    Biological self-organisation is less remarkable than it seems, and almost inevitable given local interactions.

    Their wordsThis paper suggests that biological self-organization is not as remarkable as one might think—and is (almost) inevitable, given local interactions between the states of coupled dynamical systems.

  3. Our reading

    Biological systems move around their state space but revisit a limited number of states.

    Their wordsPut simply, biological systems move around in their state space but revisit a limited number of states.

  4. Our reading

    Any ergodic system with a Markov blanket will almost surely behave in lifelike ways; nothing suggests a special role for carbon.

    Their wordsNothing in this treatment suggests a special role for carbon-based life or, more generally, the necessary conditions for life to emerge. The contribution of this work is to note that if systems are ergodic and possess a Markov blanket, they will—almost surely—show lifelike behaviour.

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