Emergence, Intrinsic Structure of Information, and Agenthood

Abstract

Emergence is a central organizing concept for the understanding of complex systems. Under the manifold mathematical notions that have been introduced to characterize emergence, the information-theoretic are of particular interest since they provide--a quantitative and transparent approach and generalize beyond the immediate scope at hand.--We discuss approaches to characterize emergence using information theory via the intrinsic temporal or compositional structure of the information dynamics of a system. This approach is devoid of any external constraints and purely a property of the information--dynamics itself. We then briefly discuss how emergence naturally connects to the concept of agenthood which has been recently defined using information flows.