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

Think of dissipative adaptation as a randomly fluctuating system “getting stuck” in the most stable states serially.

fourth law of thermodynamics.

If a system’s evolution can be predicted more accurately and reliably by looking at the causal interactions at the macroscopic level, then there must be information at work in the system.

Once an adaptive system falls into an attractor, it will remain there as long as it continues to extract the energy it needs to sustain its ordered state, and as long as external conditions do not change too drastically.

and as our spectrum of possible experiences increases, so should the intensity with which we feel them.

the future evolution of the universe cannot be accurately predicted without taking into account the future of intelligent life.

a process that continuously generates a greater diversity of species will also systematically increase the complexity of the most complex species.

In response to this incoming flow, patterns, organization, and functionality emerge naturally and predictably.

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.