Integrate: Information Integration Group

Matter, energy, force, space, and time are the fundamental constituent concepts of physics. In order to understand life, however, it is imperative to add the concept of information. When it arose, life acquired the ability to store information as material, duplicate it, and rewrite it. At the macroscopic level, living organisms can selectively acquire information, create information, and alter the environment. As such, the relationship between life and information extends to multiple scales. It is essential to elucidate the meaning and functions of information in biological phenomena at all levels, including 1) the relationship between information and free energy, as represented by the paradox of Maxwell’s demon; 2) information limitations in signaling receptors; 3) taxis and adaptation mechanism; 4) learning and prediction; 5) symbolization of information; and 6) brain and higher-order information processing. To this end, we will investigate how life, a mere aggregation of matter, acquires and generates information, as well as how we obtained the ability to think about ourselves. In practice, we will study 1) the relationship between information and matter/energy; 2) the concerted spatio-temporal dynamics of information and life; 3) the relationship between information and evolution dynamics; 4) the underlying mechanisms by which life acquired autonomy; and 5) the development of new information control techniques and learning algorithms based on knowledge obtained in studies of topics 1–4.