Federica De Domenico , Fabio Caccioli , Giacomo Livan , Guido Montagna and Oreste Nicrosini

Royal Society Open Science, July 2024 Volume 11 Issue 7

Participants in socio-economic systems are often ranked based on their performance. Rankings conveniently reduce the complexity of such systems to ordered lists. Yet, it has been shown in many contexts that those who reach the top are not necessarily the most talented, as chance plays a role in shaping rankings. Nevertheless, the role played by chance in determining success, i.e. serendipity, is underestimated, and top performers are often imitated by others under the assumption that adopting their strategies will lead to equivalent results. We investigate the tradeoff between imitation and serendipity in an agent-based model. Agents in the model receive payoffs based on their actions and may switch to different actions by either imitating others or through random selection. When imitation prevails, most agents coordinate on a single action, leading to non-meritocratic outcomes, as a minority of them accumulate the majority of payoffs. Yet, such agents are not necessarily the most skilled ones. When serendipity dominates, instead, we observe more egalitarian outcomes. The two regimes are separated by a sharp transition, which we characterize analytically in a simplified setting. We discuss the implications of our findings in a variety of contexts, ranging from academic research to business.

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Stuart J Bartlett

I introduce a new approach to semantic information based upon the influence of erasure operations (interventions) upon distributions of a system’s future trajectories through its phase space. Semantic (meaningful) information is distinguished from syntactic information by the property of having some intrinsic causal power on the future of a given system. As Shannon famously stated, syntactic information is a simple property of probability distributions (the elementary Shannon expression), or correlations between two subsystems and thus does not tell us anything about the meaning of a given message. Kolchinsky & Wolpert (2018) introduced a powerful framework for computing semantic information, which employs interventions upon the state of a system (either initial or dynamic) to erase syntactic information that might influence the viability of a subsystem (such as an organism in an environment). In this work I adapt this framework such that rather than using the viability of a subsystem, we simply observe the changes in future trajectories through a system’s phase space as a result of informational interventions (erasures or scrambling). This allows for a more general formalisation of semantic information that does not assume a primary role for the viability of a subsystem (to use examples from Kolchinsky & Wolpert (2018), a rock, a hurricane, or a cell). Many systems of interest have a semantic component, such as a neural network, but may not have such an intrinsic connection to viability as living organisms or dissipative structures. Hence this simple approach to semantic information could be applied to any living, non-living or technological system in order to quantify whether a given quantity of syntactic information within it also has semantic or causal power.

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Carlos Gershenson

I present a personal account of self-organizing systems. As such, it is necessarily biased and partial. Nevertheless, it should be useful to motivate useful discussions. The relevant contribution is not my attempts at answering questions (maybe all my answers are wrong), but the steps towards framing relevant questions to better understand self-organization, information, complexity, and emergence. With this aim, I start with a notion and examples of self-organizing systems (what?), continue with their properties and related concepts (how?), and close with applications (why?).

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Stuart Kauffman, Sudip Patra

BioSystems

We attempt in this article to formulate a conceptual and testable framework weaving Cosmos, Mind and Matter into a whole. We build on three recent discoveries, each requiring more evidence: i. The particles of the Standard Model, SU(3) x SU(2) x U(1), are formally capable of collective autocatalysis. This leads us to ask what roles such autocatalysis may have played in Cosmogenesis, and in trying to answer, Why our Laws? Why our Constants? A capacity of the particles of SU(3) x SU(2) x U(1) for collective autocatalysis may be open to experimental test, stunning if confirmed. ii. Reasonable evidence now suggests that matter can expand spacetime. The first issue is to establish this claim at or beyond 5 sigma if that can be done. If true, this process may elucidate Dark Matter, Dark Energy and Inflation and require alteration of Einstein’s Field Equations. Cosmology would be transformed. iii. Evidence at 6.49 Sigma suggests that mind can alter the outcome of the two-slit experiment. If widely and independently verified, the foundations of quantum mechanics must be altered. Mind plays a role in the universe. That role may include Cosmic Mind.

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Jie Deng, Otto X. Cordero, Tadashi Fukami, Simon A. Levin, Robert M. Pringle, Ricard Solé, Serguei Saavedra

A long-standing question in biology is whether there are common principles that characterize the development of ecological systems (the appearance of a group of taxa), regardless of organismal diversity and environmental context. Classic ecological theory holds that these systems develop following a sequenced orderly process that generally proceeds from fast-growing to slow-growing taxa and depends on life-history trade-offs. However, it is also possible that this developmental order is simply the path with the least environmental resistance for survival of the component species and hence favored by probability alone. Here, we use theory and data to show that the order from fast-to slow-growing taxa is the most likely developmental path for diverse systems when local taxon interactions self-organize to minimize environmental resistance. First, we demonstrate theoretically that a sequenced development is more likely than a simultaneous one, at least until the number of iterations becomes so large as to be ecologically implausible. We then show that greater diversity of taxa and life histories improves the likelihood of a sequenced order from fast-to slow-growing taxa. Using data from bacterial and metazoan systems, we present empirical evidence that the developmental order of ecological systems moves along the paths of least environmental resistance. The capacity of simple principles to explain the trend in the developmental order of diverse ecological systems paves the way to an enhanced understanding of the collective features characterizing the diversity of life.

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