The biological research putting purpose back into life | Aeon Essays

But emergence in nature demonstrates that complex systems can self-organize in unexpected ways without being intended or designed. Order can arise from chaos. In machine intelligence, the hope persists that if we put the pieces together the right way—through either ingenuity or sheer accident—consciousness will simply emerge as a side effect of com

purposeful or teleological behavior is only possible if the system constrains itself in a way that preserves the encoded information and transmits it to the future.

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

The organism simply needs mechanisms for evaluating the value of that feature and acting accordingly. Looked at this way, life can be considered to be a meaning generator. Living things are, you could say, those entities capable of attributing value in their environment, and thereby finding a point to the universe.