Is agency an essential concept for the effective description of life, e.g at the cellular scale? I am sympathetic, as I showed how it arises quite naturally in stochastic systems. See my Phys Rev E paper arxiv.org/abs/2503.15670 Much more to come on this .. !

Philip Ball@philipcball.bsky.social · 4w ago

Why are living things different from nonliving? In this piece for @quantamagazine.bsky.social I argue that it is because they are purposive and goal-directed: a capacity we can productively characterize as agency. www.quantamagazine.org/is-life-just...

What are the foundations of #ComplexSystems & #NetSci, really? Working in this field? Contribute a small set of papers you consider foundational (DOI only): both the obvious and the overlooked matter. 🕒 <10 minutes 👉 Take the survey: manliodedomenico.com/complexity_m... 🧵 1/ more info 👇

A new paper from the lab! We use MEG and a "local/global" design in the language domain to ask whether the transitions between words in a sentence are encoded by a shallow transition-probability mechanism, in parallel to a tree-based syntactic mechanism. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Disentangling hierarchical and sequential computations during sentence processing

Sentences in natural language have a hierarchical structure that can be described in terms of nested trees. To compose sentence meaning, the human bra…

sciencedirect.com

The word “model” hides two different ideas. Some models simplify reality to isolate a mechanism. Others predict universal properties shared by many systems. The renormalization group revealed the second possibility, and explains why simple models can describe Nature at all.

Published: Noise equals control. I detail an explicit mapping between stochastic systems and control theory, showing how goal-directed behaviour arises from purely causal stochastic systems. Illustrated with stochastic resonance & Brownian ratchets journals.aps.org/pre/abstract...

My talk from @bioctrl.bsky.social about the physical origin of agency is uploaded here: youtube.com/watch?v=YY21... TLDR: noise equals control. Nature is constantly sampling control trajectories via noise

Eric De Giuli: Noise equals endogenous control

YouTube video by Biocontrol Seminars

youtube.com

I'm very excited about this virtual talk, tomorrow at 11am ET, and open to everyone! I will explain precisely how and why agency is part of Nature, and illustrate the idea with some examples from biology and beyond. No complex mathematics.

Biocontrol Seminars@bioctrl.bsky.social · last yr.

Tomorrow, Tue 24 June, join us for our monthly online seminar! Eric De Giuli from Toronto Metropolitan University will present their work "Noise equals endogenous control" at 5pm CET / 11am ET / 8am PT As always more information at biocontrolseminars.org