个体信息论视野下生命本质问题研究的新进展

Developments of Research on the Nature of Life from the Perspective of the Information Theory of Individuality

生命本质问题的研究是生物学哲学以及科学哲学中一个经典而前沿的论题。自从薛定谔提出“生命以负熵为生”的著名观点,开创了从物理科学研究生命本质的进路。许多系统科学家和系统哲学家继承了薛定谔的研究进路,并强调了信息科学与生命本质的关系。信息论创始人申农、耗散结构论创始人普利高津等人深化了对生命本质的信息论研究。最近圣菲研究所现任所长David Krakauer等人提出个体信息论,进一步用信息论对个体进行形式化的界定和分类,深化了信息与生命本质的关系,特别是通过互信息的分解与组合将信息个体分成有机个体、群落个体和环境决定个体。信息个体的形式化定义是对薛定谔以来关于生命本质问题研究的新发展,对当代人工生命的研究也有启发意义。

The study of the nature of life is a classic and cutting-edge topic in the philosophy of biology and the philosophy of science. Since Schr9 dinger put forward the famous view that “life feeds on negative entropy”, he has pioneered the approach of studying the nature of life from physics. Many system scientists and system philosophers inherited Schr9 dinger’s research approach and emphasized the relationship between information science and the nature of life. Shannon, founder of the Information Theory, Prigogine, founder of Dissipative Structure Theory, and others have deepened the information theory research on the nature of life. Recently, David Krakauer, the current director of the Santa Fe Institute, and others proposed The Information Theory of Individuality, and further used information theory to formalize the definition of individuals and classification, deepening the relationship between information and the nature of life. Especially through the decomposition and combination of mutual information, information individuals are divided into Organismal Individuality, Colonial Individuality, and Environmental Determined Individuality. The formal definition of information individuals is a new development in Schr9 dinger’s research on the nature of life, and it is also instructive for contemporary artificial life research.