The Romance of Reality: How the Universe Organizes Itself to Create Life, Consciousness, and Cosmic Complexity

an organism’s model of the world is what enables it to stay far from equilibrium, and in the next chapter we will learn how this model comes into existence.

A system that can exercise control is known as a cybernetic system.

energy-seeking behavior is present in all forms of life, even those that lack a central nervous system.

Genetics is a question of how the information is transmitted between generations. Molecular biology is concerned with how it’s translated from DNA into protein. Developmental biology is concerned with how it’s translated from a set of proteins into a morphological structure. And evolutionary theory is essentially about how the information got there

Although these measures are only in their nascent stages, they show us that quantifying biological knowledge—information that aids far-from-equilibrium survival—can someday be a tractable task.

From this perspective, life is biological hardware running survival software.

Stated another way, his measure disregarded semantic (meaningful) information and focused exclusively on syntactic (symbolic) information.

It would not be inaccurate to characterize an organism as an embodied energy-extraction and threat-avoidance program.

Biological computation is called cognition,