Pervasive Loops: A New Framework for Studying Origin of Life and Consciousness

This book attempts to propose a unified theory of large-scale structured dynamical systems. Examples of such systems are single-cellular and multi-cellular organisms as well as the human brain. The goal is to understand and construct synthetic systems that mimic features exhibited by these biological systems. While there is a renewed interest in general artificial intelligence because of the recent progress in deep learning, the hope with this book is to expand this exploration to evolutionary systems and other harder problems like synthetic consciousness. The approach taken here is unique because there is a constant emphasis on how to construct every single feature exhibited by these biological systems both naturally i.e., without any human involvement and synthetically, in a laboratory. The strong belief is that if we cannot provide such constructions, there must be certain critical aspects that are not well understood and, hence, the proposals must be necessarily incomplete. This approach has also forced the discussion to be less philosophical. Clearly, the book is only a first attempt at achieving these goals and future work is necessary to address several gaps. Yet, it is preferable that you take this viewpoint, question every claim and potentially suggest alternative ideas as well. Hopefully, in the process, you will get a step closer in your personal journey towards understanding the living world and all its beauty.