An Information Theoretic View of Entities

Abstract.  The origin of life is undoubtedly one of the most fascinating questions confronting humankind. Theories for the origin of life have been with us for thousands of years. They have also followed the Santa Fe Institute since its origins. This workshop is part of a long-term goal of studying the origin of Darwinian evolution. What are the conditions under which Darwinian evolution will emerge in a system?  In studying the origin of an evolutionary process, one of the stumbling blocks is the mathematical definition of entities, the units on which the evolutionary process can act.  Two recent promising directions have been proposed for defining entities in dynamic systems. The first is the definition of entities as carriers of information between different time-points of the dynamics, while defining the boundary between individual and environment by maximizing the autonomy of the individual (Krakauer  in press). A second approach involves Epsilon machines (Crutchfield 1989, 1999), which can be seen as a granular representation of the dynamics of a system that reproduces its full behavior. In this meeting we hope to analyze and expand on these approaches to study whether such a mathematical definition of an entity can be used in an evolutionary context.