Review
Version 1
Preserved in Portico This version is not peer-reviewed
Self-Organisation of Prediction Models
Version 1
: Received: 29 September 2023 / Approved: 30 September 2023 / Online: 30 September 2023 (05:36:59 CEST)
A peer-reviewed article of this Preprint also exists.
Feistel, R. Self-Organisation of Prediction Models. Entropy 2023, 25, 1596. Feistel, R. Self-Organisation of Prediction Models. Entropy 2023, 25, 1596.
Abstract
Living organisms are active open systems far from thermodynamic equilibrium. The ability to behave actively corresponds to dynamical metastability: minor but supercritical internal or external effects may trigger major substantial actions such as gross mechanical motion, dissipating internally accumulated energy reserves. Gaining selective advantage from beneficial use of activity requires a consistent combination of sensual perception, memorised experience, statistical or causal prediction models, and resulting favourable decisions on actions. This information processing chain originated from mere physical interaction processes prior to life, here denoted as structural information exchange. From there, the self-organised transition to symbolic information processing marks the beginning of life, evolving by novel purposivity of trial-and-error feedback and accumulation of symbolic information. The emergence of symbols and prediction models can be described as a ritualisation transition, a symmetry-breaking kinetic phase transition of the 2nd kind previously known from behavioural biology. The related new symmetry is the neutrally stable arbitrariness, conventionality or code invariance of symbols with respect to their meaning. The meaning of such symbols is given by the structural effect they ultimately unleash, directly or indirectly, by deciding on which actions to take. The early genetic code represents the first symbols. The genetically inherited symbolic information is the first prediction model for activities sufficient for survival under the condition of environmental continuity, sometimes understood as a “final causality” property of the model.
Keywords
Self-organisation; prediction; symbols; observation; ritualisation; information; models; causality; decision; activity; homoclinic orbit
Subject
Physical Sciences, Biophysics
Copyright: This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Comments (0)
We encourage comments and feedback from a broad range of readers. See criteria for comments and our Diversity statement.
Leave a public commentSend a private comment to the author(s)
* All users must log in before leaving a comment
