in an essentially random manner, an open system driven by a steady flow of energy will evolve deterministically toward an attractor that represents the region of the configuration space that corresponds to a stable molecular arrangement.

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

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

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.

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

The total amount of free energy in the universe must decrease with time. The total amount of thermal entropy in the universe must increase with time.

Most of us have been taught that life is fragile, its existence always at risk, but this is a parochial error stemming from, ironically enough, an excessively anthropocentric worldview.

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

An attractor is a set of states or configurations that a dynamical system naturally tends to evolve toward, regardless of its “initial conditions”—how the system started off. Think of a ball rolling down a hill into a valley. The basin of the valley is an attractor.