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

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

What Shannon’s method fails to capture by ignoring meaning is knowledge—that is, information with causal power.

have to play by Boltzmann’s statistical rules.

Think of it this way: there are many more ways for your room to be a complete mess (disordered) than there are ways of being neatly organized.

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

In other words, a natural pressure to minimize free energy and produce entropy spontaneously creates an ordered structure with an objective function.

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

Spontaneous emergence is described as self-organization because the emergent structure arises due to the laws of nature and the collective interactions of the system’s components, and not because of the actions of an external agent, like a human engineer or a supernatural deity. It is worth noting that it may be a bit misleading to call the order-f

When gradients become large enough and sufficient free energy becomes available, a cycling structure will spontaneously emerge to enable the gradient to dissipate more efficiently.