Instruct: Identify the main and secondary category of Arxiv papers based on the titles and abstracts
Query: Semantic information, autonomous agency, and nonequilibrium statistical
  physics   Shannon information theory provides various measures of so-called "syntactic
information", which reflect the amount of statistical correlation between
systems. In contrast, the concept of "semantic information" refers to those
correlations which carry significance or "meaning" for a given system. Semantic
information plays an important role in many fields, including biology,
cognitive science, and philosophy, and there has been a long-standing interest
in formulating a broadly applicable and formal theory of semantic information.
In this paper we introduce such a theory. We define semantic information as the
syntactic information that a physical system has about its environment which is
causally necessary for the system to maintain its own existence. "Causal
necessity" is defined in terms of counter-factual interventions which scramble
correlations between the system and its environment, while "maintaining
existence" is defined in terms of the system's ability to keep itself in a low
entropy state. We also use recent results in nonequilibrium statistical physics
to analyze semantic information from a thermodynamic point of view. Our
framework is grounded in the intrinsic dynamics of a system coupled to an
environment, and is applicable to any physical system, living or otherwise. It
leads to formal definitions of several concepts that have been intuitively
understood to be related to semantic information, including "value of
information", "semantic content", and "agency".

10
The categories of this paper are: q-bio
17
The categories of this paper are: q-fin
0
The categories of this paper are: hep-ph
25
The categories of this paper are: patt-sol
34
The categories of this paper are: chem-ph
33
The categories of this paper are: plasm-ph
8
The categories of this paper are: hep-ex
32
The categories of this paper are: atom-ph
16
The categories of this paper are: stat
13
The categories of this paper are: quant-ph
21
The categories of this paper are: adap-org
35
The categories of this paper are: mtrl-th
12
The categories of this paper are: nucl-th
30
The categories of this paper are: q-alg
20
The categories of this paper are: acc-phys
24
The categories of this paper are: dg-ga