Perhaps the most distinct question in science throughout the ages has been the one of perceivable reality, treated both in physics and philosophy. Reality is acting upon us, and we, and life in general, are acting upon reality. Potentiality, found both in quantum reality and in the activity of life, plays a key role. In quantum reality observation turns potentiality into reality. Again, life computes possibilities in various ways based on past actions, and acts on the basis of these computations. This book is about a new approach to biology (and physics, of course!). Its subtitle suggests a perpetual movement and interplay between two elusive aspects of modern science — reality/matter and potentiality/mind, between physics and biology — both captured and triggered by mathematics — to understand and explain emergence, development and life all the way up to consciousness. But what is the real/potential difference between living and non-living matter? How does time in potentiality differ from time in reality? What we need to understand these differences is an integrative approach. This book contemplates how to encircle life to obtain a formal system, equivalent to the ones in physics. Integral Biomathics attempts to explore the interplay between reality and potentiality.

Often people have wondered why there is no introductory text on category theory aimed at philosophers working in related areas. The answer is simple: what makes categories interesting and significant is their specific use for specific purposes. These uses and purposes, however, vary over many areas, both "pure", e.g., mathematical, foundational and logical, and "applied", e.g., applied to physics, biology and the nature and structure of mathematical models. Borrowing from the title of Saunders Mac Lane's seminal work "Categories for the Working Mathematician", this book aims to bring the concepts of category theory to philosophers working in areas ranging from mathematics to proof theory to computer science to ontology, from to physics to biology to cognition, from mathematical modeling to the structure of scientific theories to the structure of the world. Moreover, it aims to do this in a way that is accessible to non-specialists. Each chapter is written by either a category-theorist or a philosopher working in one of the represented areas, and in a way that builds on the concepts that are already familiar to philosophers working in these areas.

This book is about nature considered as the totality of physical existence, the universe, and our present day attempts to understand it. If we see the universe as a network of networks of computational processes at many different levels of organization, what can we learn about physics, biology, cognition, social systems, and ecology expressed through interacting networks of elementary particles, atoms, molecules, cells, (and especially neurons when it comes to understanding of cognition and intelligence), organs, organisms and their ecologies? Regarding our computational models of natural phenomena Feynman famously wondered: “Why should it take an infinite amount of logic to figure out what one tiny piece of space/time is going to do?” Phenomena themselves occur so quickly and automatically in nature. Can we learn how to harness nature’s computational power as we harness its energy and materials? This volume includes a selection of contributions from the Symposium on Natural Computing/Unconventional Computing and Its Philosophical Significance, organized during the AISB/IACAP World Congress 2012, held in Birmingham, UK, on July 2-6, on the occasion of the centenary of Alan Turing’s birth. In this book, leading researchers investigated questions of computing nature by exploring various facets of computation as we find it in nature: relationships between different levels of computation, cognition with learning and intelligence, mathematical background, relationships to classical Turing computation and Turing’s ideas about computing nature - unorganized machines and morphogenesis. It addresses questions of information, representation and computation, interaction as communication, concurrency and agent models; in short this book presents natural computing and unconventional computing as extension of the idea of computation as symbol manipulation.

The book Eco-Restoration of the Polluted Environment: A Biological Perspective explores recent advances in biological strategies for the remediation of polluted environments, including soil, water, and air. It covers bioremediation of heavy metals, radioactive waste, and waste gases, which are believed to be bottleneck problems for researchers working in this field. The book contains separate chapters on genetic engineering technology for enhancement of the bioremediation potential of bioresources and the role of biosurfactants, enzymes, and exo-polysaccharides for bioremediation of polluted environments, along with basic aspects of eco-restoration by microorganisms. It summarizes the significant developments of many years of research in bioremediation technology and discusses them critically by presenting selected examples, while also considering future research directions in the area. Features: Deep insight into the modes of action of various bioremediation strategies, as well as the status and progress of bioremediation technology for sustainable developmental practices A research overview of bioremediation strategies using engineered biological resources for remediation of contaminants. The book will also accelerate the application of suitable engineered microbes and plants for field applications A survey of interdisciplinary findings and insights on the impact of pollution on the ecosystem and human health, climate, and other global changes, with individual solutions to the pollution issue Comprehensive information for relevant stakeholders such as global leaders, agriculturists, investors, innovators, farmers, policymakers, extension workers, agro-industrialists, environmentalists, and the education and health sectors, as well as students and researchers in the field

Language plays a central role in human life. However, the term "language" as defined in the language sciences of the 20th century and the traditions these have drawn on, have arguably limited our thinking about what language is and does. The two inter-linked volumes of Thibault’s study articulate crucially important aspects of an emerging new perspective shift on language—the Distributed Language view—that is now receiving more and more attention internationally. Rejecting the classical view that the fundamental architecture of language can be localised as a number of inter-related levels of formal linguistic organisation that function as the coded inputs and outputs to each other, the distributed language view argues that languaging behaviour is a bio-cultural organiation of process that is embodied, multimodal, and integrated across multiple space-time scales. Thibault argues that we need to think of human languaging as the distinctively human mode of our becoming and being selves in the extended human ecology and the kinds of experiencing that this makes possible. Paradoxically, this also means thinking about language in non-linguistic ways that break the grip of the conventional meta-languages for thinking about human languaging. Thibault’s book grounds languaging in process theory: languaging and the forms of experience it actualises is always an event, not a thing that we "use". In taking a distinctively interdisciplinary approach, the book relates dialogical theories of human sense-making to the distributed view of human cognition, to recent thinking about distributed language, to ecological psychology, and to languaging as inter-individual affective dynamics grounded in the subjective lives of selves. In taking this approach, the book considers the coordination of selves in social encounters, the emergent forms of self-reflexivity that characterise these encounters, and the implications for how we think of and live our human sociality, not as something that is mediated by over-arching codes and systems, but as emerging from the endogenous subjectivities of selves when they seek to coordinate with other selves and with the situations, artefacts, social institutions, and technologies that populate the extended human ecology. The two volumes aim to bring our understanding of human languaging closer to human embodiment, experience, and feeling while also showing how languaging enables humans to transcend local circumstances and thus to dialogue with cultural tradition. Volume I focuses on the shorter timescales of bodily dynamics in languaging activity. Volume II integrates the shorter timescales of body dynamics to the longer cultural–historical timescales of the linguistic and cultural norms and patterns to which bodily dynamics are integrated.

The global ecological crisis is the greatest challenge humanity has ever had to confront, and humanity is failing. The triumph of the neo-liberal agenda, together with a debauched ‘scientism’, has reduced nature and people to nothing but raw materials, instruments and consumers to be efficiently managed in a global market dominated by corporate managers, media moguls and technocrats. The arts and the humanities have been devalued, genuine science has been crippled, and the quest for autonomy and democracy undermined. The resultant trajectory towards global ecological destruction appears inexorable, and neither governments nor environmental movements have significantly altered this, or indeed, seem able to. The Philosophical Foundations of Ecological Civilization is a wide-ranging and scholarly analysis of this failure. This book reframes the dynamics of the debate beyond the discourses of economics, politics and techno-science. Reviving natural philosophy to align science with the humanities, it offers the categories required to reform our modes of existence and our institutions so that we augment, rather than undermine, the life of the ecosystems of which we are part. From this philosophical foundation, the author puts forth a manifesto for transforming our culture into one which could provide an effective global environmental movement and provide the foundations for a global ecological civilization.

The main part of the book consists of the dialogue between physicist Otto Rössler, and artist and AI researcher Bill Seaman with the commentaries disclosing information perspective by information scientist Mark Burgin and Bill Seaman. In this dialogue, Rössler and Seaman discuss concepts surrounding Rössler's major research over his lifetime. Additionally, each research topic is linked to the set of papers and books published by Rössler and other related collaborative researchers. The goal is to delineate an intellectual directory for future researchers. The discussed topics being transdisciplinary in nature cross many fields in science and technology. A comprehensive historical bibliography is also included. The work explores many fields germane to theoretical science as Rössler was often quite early in developing these fields and interacting with many famous scientists. This work pertains to information theory, which has often been left out of the historical literature.Burgin as an expert in information theory is providing an information perspective on this dialogue adding historical discussion and relevant scientific and mathematical underpinnings of the discussed ideas. His observations are complemented by Seaman, who presents the synthesis of artistic and scientific outlook.Addendum contains articles describing Rössler's relationships to colleagues from multiple fields, a parable by Rössler and papers related to Rössler's research and theoretical models of processes in the universe.

Cognition-Based Evolution is the first comprehensive alternative to 20th-century Neodarwinism, proposing a radical 21st-century evolutionary framework with a novel point of origination: all cells are intelligent and must measure uncertain environmental information to sustain themselves. In Cognition-Based Evolution, life is defined by cognition. From this differential stance, evolutionary biology transforms into the science of why, how, what, and with whom cells measure and communicate under stressful environmental conditions. Life's context is uncertain environmental information, communication is its means, and genes are its tools. Evolution is its yield as continuous non-random self-referential cellular problem-solving.

Modern information communication technology eradicates barriers of geographic distances, making the world globally interdependent, but this spatial globalization has not eliminated cultural fragmentation. The Two Cultures of C.P. Snow (that of science–technology and that of humanities) are drifting apart even faster than before, and they themselves crumble into increasingly specialized domains. Disintegrated knowledge has become subservient to the competition in technological and economic race leading in the direction chosen not by the reason, intellect, and shared value-based judgement, but rather by the whims of autocratic leaders or fashion controlled by marketers for the purposes of political or economic dominance. If we want to restore the authority of our best available knowledge and democratic values in guiding humanity, first we have to reintegrate scattered domains of human knowledge and values and offer an evolving and diverse vision of common reality unified by sound methodology. This collection of articles responds to the call from the journal Philosophies to build a new, networked world of knowledge with domain specialists from different disciplines interacting and connecting with other knowledge-and-values-producing and knowledge-and-values-consuming communities in an inclusive, extended, contemporary natural–philosophic manner. In this process of synthesis, scientific and philosophical investigations enrich each other—with sciences informing philosophies about the best current knowledge of the world, both natural and human-made—while philosophies scrutinize the ontological, epistemological, and methodological foundations of sciences, providing scientists with questions and conceptual analyses. This is all directed at extending and deepening our existing comprehension of the world, including ourselves, both as humans and as societies, and humankind.

There has been no mechanistic explanation for evolutionary change consistent with phylogeny in the 150 years since the publication of ‘Origins’. As a result, progress in the field of evolutionary biology has stagnated, relying on descriptive observations and genetic associations rather testable scientific measures. This book illuminates the need for a larger evolutionary-based platform for biology. Like physics and chemistry, biology needs a central theory in order to frame the questions that arise, the way hypotheses are tested, and how to interpret the data in the context of a continuum.The reduction of biology to its self-referential, self-organized properties provides the opportunity to recognize the continuum from the Singularity/Big Bang to Consciousness based on cell-cell communication for homeostasis.