ArticleInterface focus2018
Semantic information, autonomous agency and non-equilibrium statistical physics.
Article in Interface focus, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 43 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
43 citing papers in PubMed.
- Matters of life and death in computational cell biology.NPJ systems biology and applications · 2026Review
- Identifying and investigating emergent behaviour in neural systems.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2026Article
- Towards Pragmatist Thermodynamics: An Essay on the Natural Philosophy of Entropy and Sustainability.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Article
- Toward aitiopoietic cognition: bridging the evolutionary divide between biological and machine-learned causal systems.Frontiers in cognition · 2025Review
- Fundamental constraints to the logic of living systems.Interface focus · 2024Review
- Self-Improvising Memory: A Perspective on Memories as Agential, Dynamically Reinterpreting Cognitive Glue.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- Semantic Communication: A Survey of Its Theoretical Development.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Review
- Unifying biophysical consciousness theories with MaxCon: maximizing configurations of brain connectivity.Frontiers in systems neuroscience · 2024Article
- If Engrams Are the Answer, What Is the Question?Advances in neurobiology · 2024Article
- Theoretical perspective on synthetic man-made life: Learning from the origin of life.Quantitative biology (Beijing, China) · 2023Review
- Chemical Systems for Wetware Artificial Life: Selected Perspectives in Synthetic Cell Research.International journal of molecular sciences · 2023Article
- Planetary Scale Information Transmission in the Biosphere and Technosphere: Limits and Evolution.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- A Role for Bottom-Up Synthetic Cells in the Internet of Bio-Nano Things?Molecules (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- Cells as the first data scientists.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2023Article
- Toward Interdisciplinary Synergies in Molecular Communications: Perspectives from Synthetic Biology, Nanotechnology, Communications Engineering and Philosophy of Science.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- Editorial: Bio A.I. - from embodied cognition to enactive robotics.Frontiers in neurorobotics · 2023Article
- Recurrent neural networks in synthetic cells: a route to autonomous molecular agents?Frontiers in bioengineering and biotechnology · 2023Article
- What does it mean to be an agent?Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- EXK-SC: A Semantic Communication Model Based on Information Framework Expansion and Knowledge Collision.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Shannon information theory provides various measures of so-called syntactic information, which reflect the amount of statistical correlation between systems. By contrast, the concept of 'semantic information' refers to those correlations which carry significance or 'meaning' for a given system. Semantic information plays an important role in many fields, including biology, cognitive science and philosophy, and there has been a long-standing interest in formulating a broadly applicable and formal theory of semantic information. In this paper, we introduce such a theory. We define semantic information as the syntactic information that a physical system has about its environment which is causally necessary for the system to maintain its own existence. 'Causal necessity' is defined in terms of counter-factual interventions which scramble correlations between the system and its environment, while 'maintaining existence' is defined in terms of the system's ability to keep itself in a low entropy state. We also use recent results in non-equilibrium statistical physics to analyse semantic information from a thermodynamic point of view. Our framework is grounded in the intrinsic dynamics of a system coupled to an environment, and is applicable to any physical system, living or otherwise. It leads to formal definitions of several concepts that have been intuitively understood to be related to semantic information, including 'value of information', 'semantic content' and 'agency'.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.