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

For example, scientists at the Santa Fe Institute, such as Artemy Kolchinsky and distinguished physicist David Wolpert, are working on semantic information measures based on an approach known as teleosemantics, which assumes that the system being analyzed pursues some objective.

The overarching thesis is that we live in a computational universe that is continuously evolving into an increasingly complex, functional, and sentient state. This means that humans are neither a cosmic accident nor the end goal of evolution. Instead, we are an intermediary step on the cosmic evolutionary ladder of becoming.

abiogenesis is reconceptualized as a thermodynamic event that opened up new energy flow channels on Earth to facilitate entropy production. And as these channels emerged and expanded to relieve thermodynamic pressure, the increased energy flow stimulated further chemical and biological self-organization, eventually giving rise to the interconnected

high-entropy macrostates have more equivalent microstates,

Life, among other things, is copy-making machinery.

You could say that energy organizes matter into life, and life organizes information into knowledge. And it is knowledge that makes the universe comprehensible to intelligent life. Or, from a less anthropocentric perspective, it is knowledge that allows the universe to comprehend itself, through intelligent life. We must remember that we are not di

Semantic information of this kind is sometimes called intentional information, but it may be easier to think about it as adaptive information, or knowledge, since it reduces environmental uncertainty, and therefore the ignorance, of the complex system.

We can think of autocatalysis as a process that allows a chemical system to quickly self-repair or self-amplify in size and complexity through a series of linked reactions

The steam engine, which had been around for some time, was proof that energy could be extracted from heat flow to do “work,” meaning something useful, like moving, lifting, or accelerating a body of mass by exerting a force on it. Work can’t be done unless it is driven by a physical force, which always requires energy.