Sublime

the dissipative system is driven even further away from equilibrium by an increase in the rate of energy flow, and if it does not crack under pressure, another critical threshold will eventually be crossed, and the evolving system will enter a new attractor—

In statistical mechanics, the system dynamics is ergodic when over the long term it explores all available state space

not very useful, nor correct from an epistemic point of view. It applies to populations (Darwinian), and is completely silent if you consider a single living organism at a time

IIT, Φ measures the amount of information a system generates “as a whole,” over and above the amount of information generated by its parts independently. This underpins the main claim of the theory, which is that a system is conscious to the extent that its whole generates more information than its parts.

Here, meaningful information is information that influences the processes of natural selection.

We know that nothing can be perfectly hedged because it derives from profoundly incomprehensible uncertainty, and uncertainty on uncertainty, and uncertainty on that uncertainty, and so on.

Equally, and thinking back to our discussion of the compressibility of data, if complex life is better at the computations needed for lossy compression—throwing away irrelevant information—it can enhance its fitness without as much burden from carrying around all of that environmental information.

To maintain order and structure in an evolving system requires the continual supply and use of energy whose by-product is disorder.