The physiology of coordination: self-resolving diverse affinities via the sparse order in relevant noise.

Living systems at any given moment enact a very constrained set of end-directed and contextually appropriate actions that are self-initiated from among innumerable possible alternatives. However, these constrained actions are not necessarily because the system has reduced its sensitivities to themselves and their surroundings. Quite the contrary, living systems are continually open to novel and unanticipated stimulations that require a physiology of coordination.

Living systems are smarter bots: Slime mold semiosis versus AI symbol manipulation.

Although machines may be good at mimicking, they are not currently able, as organisms are, to act creatively. We offer an understanding of the emergent qualities of biological sign processing in terms of generalization, association, and encryption. We use slime mold as a model of minimal cognition and compare it to deep-learning video game bots, which some claim have evolved beyond their merely quantitative algorithms.

The transition from constraint to regulation at the origin of life.

The origin of living dynamics required a local evasion of thermodynamic degradation by maintaining critical dynamical and structural constraints. Scenarios for life`s origin that fail to distinguish between constrained chemistry and regulated metabolism do not address the question of how living processes first emerge from simpler constraints on molecular interactions. We describe a molecular model system consisting of coupled reciprocal catalysis and self-assembly in which one of the catalytic bi-products tends to spontaneously self-assemble into a containing shell (analogous to a viral capsule).