The Ascent of Information: Books, Bits, Genes, Machines, and Life's Unending Algorithm

The phase transition proposed from non-alive to alive has to be more intricate and only truly visible when you investigate the hierarchy of information flow:

Equally, and thinking back to our discussion of the compressibility of data, if complex life is better at the computations needed for lossy compression—throwing away irrelevant information—it can enhance its fitness without as much burden from carrying around all of that environmental information.

One of the biggest challenges with the idea of information flow and control as a defining property of life (and a window into what could be new physics) is that it still tends to encompass entities or systems that we traditionally think of as inanimate. An example would be anything that a biological entity fabricates, because in that fabrication th

You can think about Shannon’s entropy as a way to measure the size of those instructions, and therefore a measure of the thermodynamic conditions they describe. Informational entropy and physical entropy are two inextricably linked sides to the same story.

we’re missing what’s right in front of us. Evolution has been tinkering with ways to better propagate information on Earth since the get-go four billion years in the past.

if the metalworld really has its own natural selection and evolution, does it too have a universal way of encoding forms and functions across generations?

Here, meaningful information is information that influences the processes of natural selection.

In these past two hundred thousand years, humans have incubated a dataome. That dataome has, as evidenced across the pages of this book, become increasingly intertwined with our survival and our behavior as a species. By several measures, including the comparison of global NOPS and FLOPs capacities, and the rise of our metalworld’s resource demands

In the history of information theory, and science in general, one of the most influential research papers of the twentieth century is Claude Shannon’s “A Mathematical Theory of Communication,”