| Preface |
| Introduction |
| Models of life and mind |
| Pitfalls of dynamical models |
| A Constructive Approach to Models |
| Foundations |
| Causality and determinism: 'why'-s and 'how'-s |
| Time and information |
| Observables |
| The concept of information set |
| Encodings of observables into variables |
| The modelling relation |
| From Observations to a Theory of Dynamics |
| The Zeno paradoxes and the shuttle principle |
| On the notion of state |
| Anticipation and the existence proof for states |
| Material and formal implications |
| The Mechanistic Universe |
| An alternative view of mechanics |
| Dynamics as statics: the walled-in universe |
| The atomistic perspective |
| The nature of mechanistic systems |
| Component-Systems: Beyond Algorithmic Dynamics |
| The concept of component-system |
| Origins of the concept |
| Problem properties |
| The concept of immensity |
| The main theorem |
| Universal libraries |
| Creation and non-algorithmic self-modification |
| Complexity and Its Increase in Systems |
| The concept of complexity |
| Mathematical complexity theory |
| Relative complexity |
| Dynamic complexity |
| The increase of complexity |
| Self-Reproduction and Computation |
| Self-replication as a means for existence |
| Self-reproducing automata |
| Construction, reproduction and computation |
| Self-reference and autopoiesis |
| A model of self-reproduction |
| The Wigner paradox |
| The Concept of Information |
| Syntactic information concepts |
| Semantic concepts |
| Towards a causal theory |
| Two types of information: knowledge and action |
| Perspective |
| Law, form, and meaning: three vistas of causality |
| The Church-Turing hypothesis |
| References |
| Index |
| Authors index |
| Preface |
| Introduction |
| Models of life and mind |
| Pitfalls of dynamical models |
| A Constructive Approach to Models |
| Foundations |
