Structure of Information, and Agenthood

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.