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Eric De Giuli @ericdegiuli.bsky.social · 09/07/2026

Is agency an essential concept for the effective description of life, e.g at the cellular scale? I am sympathetic, as I showed how it arises quite naturally in stochastic systems. See my Phys Rev E paper arxiv.org/abs/2503.15670 Much more to come on this .. !

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Reposted by Eric De Giuli

Manlio De Domenico @manlius.bsky.social · 29/04/2026

What are the foundations of #ComplexSystems & #NetSci, really? Working in this field? Contribute a small set of papers you consider foundational (DOI only): both the obvious and the overlooked matter. 🕒 <10 minutes 👉 Take the survey: manliodedomenico.com/complexity_m... 🧵 1/ more info 👇

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Reposted by Eric De Giuli

Stanislas Dehaene @standehaene.bsky.social · 14/04/2026

A new paper from the lab! We use MEG and a "local/global" design in the language domain to ask whether the transitions between words in a sentence are encoded by a shallow transition-probability mechanism, in parallel to a tree-based syntactic mechanism. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

sciencedirect.com

Disentangling hierarchical and sequential computations during sentence processing

Sentences in natural language have a hierarchical structure that can be described in terms of nested trees. To compose sentence meaning, the human bra…

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Eric De Giuli @ericdegiuli.bsky.social · 04/03/2026

The word “model” hides two different ideas. Some models simplify reality to isolate a mechanism. Others predict universal properties shared by many systems. The renormalization group revealed the second possibility, and explains why simple models can describe Nature at all.

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Eric De Giuli @ericdegiuli.bsky.social · 02/09/2025

Published: Noise equals control. I detail an explicit mapping between stochastic systems and control theory, showing how goal-directed behaviour arises from purely causal stochastic systems. Illustrated with stochastic resonance & Brownian ratchets journals.aps.org/pre/abstract...

journals.aps.org

Noise equals control

Stochastic systems have a control-theoretic interpretation in which noise plays the role of control. In the weak-noise limit, relevant at low temperatures or in large populations, this leads to a prec...

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Eric De Giuli @ericdegiuli.bsky.social · 09/07/2025

My talk from @bioctrl.bsky.social about the physical origin of agency is uploaded here: youtube.com/watch?v=YY21... TLDR: noise equals control. Nature is constantly sampling control trajectories via noise

youtube.com

Eric De Giuli: Noise equals endogenous control

YouTube video by Biocontrol Seminars

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Eric De Giuli @ericdegiuli.bsky.social · 23/06/2025

I'm very excited about this virtual talk, tomorrow at 11am ET, and open to everyone! I will explain precisely how and why agency is part of Nature, and illustrate the idea with some examples from biology and beyond. No complex mathematics.

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