Chris Fields, James F. Glazebrook, and Michael Levin

Entropy 2024, 26(3), 194

The ideas of self-observation and self-representation, and the concomitant idea of self-control, pervade both the cognitive and life sciences, arising in domains as diverse as immunology and robotics. Here, we ask in a very general way whether, and to what extent, these ideas make sense. Using a generic model of physical interactions, we prove a theorem and several corollaries that severely restrict applicable notions of self-observation, self-representation, and self-control. We show, in particular, that adding observational, representational, or control capabilities to a meta-level component of a system cannot, even in principle, lead to a complete meta-level representation of the system as a whole. We conclude that self-representation can at best be heuristic, and that self models cannot, in general, be empirically tested by the systems that implement them.

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F. Al Reda, S. Faure, B. Maury, E. Pinsard

Journal of Computational Physics

• Numerical investigation of the Faster is Slower effect based on a parameter free model.

• Integration of an inhibition tendency of polite pedestrians.

• Numerical evidence of the fluidizing role of an obstacle upstream the exit during evacuation.

• Numerical recovering of an experimental power law for time lapses.

Read the full article at: www.sciencedirect.com