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

why brains support self-modeling; they allow an adaptive system to encode the causal consequences of their own actions,

Because human mathematicians can see the truth of an undecidable statement that is the numerical equivalent to “This statement has no proof,” the mind seems to be doing something beyond raw computation:

We can lessen the allergic reaction to the teleological cosmic narrative by simply referring to life by its more technical name, “adaptive complexity,”

The universe can be understood best, and life can be understood best, not as a thing, but as a process.

non-equilibrium physics).

phase transition,

“Life is not something that happens on a planet; it is something that happens to a planet.”2

Evolutionary epistemology emphasizes that the evolutionary process is a problem-solving procedure that creates knowledge.

global patterns of synchronized activity suddenly emerge, and the system gains some new property or function, appropriately called an emergent property.