So for the last year or so, I've been increasingly interested in complexity theory and chaos dynamics within the context of self-organization and emergence, and I was wondering if anyone had any recommendations on texts or landmark papers on this niche, especially with regards to the nonequlibrium dynamics of abiogenesis & cellular morphogenesis.

Bonus points if it specifically talks about self-organizational aspects of biochem systems arise because of certain physiochemical properties that seem baked into the laws of physics that make them tend towards the intertia of entropic gradients, etc. and how information theory might tie into it all.

I'm also interested in the upper limits of these self-organizational processes as far as thermodynamic entropy S Shannon entropy H go, I think these are called Bekenstein bounds but I'm not quite sure and I could be grossly misunderstanding the concept.

I'd appreciate any reading that might help me first pick up the words I'm looking for to figure out the interplay between what I'd like to look at because, despite the reading I've done so far, I'm not sure what I know and I'm even less sure about what I don't know or might be missing.

Here are some relevant texts I've read so, just for reference to avoid repeated recommendations and so anyone can sort of gauge my existing content knowledge:

I'd consider Schroedinger's Mind & Matter, What Is Life and Kauffman's World Beyond Physics, and Origins of Order as foundational texts for the trajectory I'm interested in
Nick Lane's Transformer and Oxygen
Strogatz's Nonlinear dynamics and chaos (heavy read, need to give it another few rounds but maybe after I get through the recs I get from here hopefully)
Mitchell's Complexity and Intro to Genetic Algorithms
Juarrero's Dynamics in Action was a major game change but this could use another read over too
I've also gone through some of Medawar's writings, namely Aristotle to Zoos and his lecture, An Unsolved Problem of Biology
Edelman's text on molecular embryology 'Topobiology' has been very helpful to orient myself as well

I think.. landmark papers might be ideal, I could probably use my ability to parse them and understand their significant as a useful benchmark to gauge where I'm at right now. But anything anyone thinks might help me orient myself would be appreciated. Even if it's undergraduate math texts, because I could probably use those too considering I'm pretty lacking.

Boosts would be very much appreciated since I'm not sure if I've managed to find most of the complexity folks from Santa Fe here yet.

Thank you in advance.

@NeuroLeyla Thank you Leyla

Sorry I'd been swamped lately but I've finally got the time to go through this over the coming weekend

I'll see how it goes

@aazad "A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History | The MIT Press" is one I've heard of recommended from Jordan Hall, haven't read it yet.

@aazad that's quite an initial reading list. lots of adjacent work in the "origin of life" problem, eg Walker's review paper and its citations royalsocietypublishing.org/doi , work by Tononi's group on causation and the brain. You may also be interested in the project of the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis extendedevolutionarysynthesis. in particular it's attention to reciprocal causation in evo dynamics.

What you're touching on is fundamentally transdisciplinary, so there's a lot of threads to pull :)

@aazad and you mentioned Juarerro, but this chapter is also inline, relating top-down causation and Shannon entropy academic.oup.com/mit-press-sch . Also, this recent blog post still in my tabs offers a provocative view on neuron evolution wiringthebrain.com/2022/12/how

@junosz Thank you for all the recommendations, looks like I know what my weekend's going to be upto.

And yes, I'm already acquainted with Yohan from discourse on Twitter, and I've bothered him enough via DMs to pick his brain about peripheral topics. Kevin's blog is a regular read as well.

Looks like I'm on the right track as far as converging all these threads go. Regardless, thank you again!

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