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

that adaptive systems store a simplified representation or model of the world they inhabit. As evolution and adaptive learning proceed, life is effectively performing statistical inference and updating its model’s “beliefs” about the world in a Bayesian fashion.

why do we care about knowledge?

evolution, learning, and the scientific method all create knowledge using the same general mechanism, and they are therefore part of a single cosmic process that continuously creates complexity.

statistical entropy, a measure of configurational disorder.

is how that information is shared or distributed throughout the brain network that gives rise to our rich and vivid conscious experience.

The ideal theory of everything should not only explain the behavior of fundamental particles and forces but also all natural phenomena, including those that are emergent, like life, mind, culture, science, and technology.

law of requisite variety

Because the universe “wants” to produce entropy at the fastest possible rate, it will actually create organized systems that help it achieve its thermodynamic goal more efficiently.

Since Boltzmann’s entropy measure is not about the dispersion of heat per se, but the evolving spatial configuration of a many-particle system’s components, we may call it statistical entropy, or configurational entropy.