Contents

Contents

Acknowledgements

0: ABSENCE
The missing cipher
What matters?
Calculating with absence
A Zeno's paradox of the mind
"As simple as possible, but not too simple"

1: (W)HOLES
A stone's throw
What's missing?
Denying the magic
Telos ex machina
Ex nihilo nihil fit
When less is more

2: HOMUNCULI
The little man in my head
Homuncular representations
The vessel of teleology
Hiding final cause
Gods of the gaps
Preformation and epigenesis
Mentalese
Mind all the way down?

3: GOLEMS
Elimination Schemes
Heads of the Hydra
Dead truth
The ghost in the computer
The ballad of Deep Blue

4: TELEONOMY
Back to the future
The Law of Effect
Pseudopurpose
Blood, brains, and silicon
Fractions of life
The road not taken

5: EMERGENCE
Novelty
The evolution of emergence
Reductionism
The emergentists
A house of cards?
Complexity and "chaos"
Processes and parts

6: CONSTRAINT
Habits
Redundancy
More similar = less different
Concrete abstraction
Nothing is irreducible

7: HOMEODYNAMICS
Why things change
A brief history of energy
Falling and forcing
Reframing thermodynamics
A formal cause of efficient causes?

8: MORPHODYNAMICS
Order from disorder
Self-simplification
Far-from-equilibrium thermodynamics
Rayleigh-Bénard convection: A case study
The diversity of morphodynamic processes
The exception that proves the rule

9: TELEODYNAMICS
A common dynamical thread
Linked origins
Compounded asymmetries
Self-reproducing mechanisms
What is life?
Frankencells

10: AUTOGENESIS
The threshold of function
Autocatalysis
Containment
Synergy
Autogens
Autogenic evolution
The ratchet of life
The emergence of teleodynamics

11: WORK
Forced to change
Effort
Against spontaneity
Transformation
Morphodynamic work
Teleodynamic work
Emergent causal powers

12: INFORMATION
Missing the difference
Omissions, expectations, and absences
Two entropies
Information and reference
It takes work
Taming the demon

13: SIGNIFICANCE
Aboutness matters
Beyond cybernetics
Working it out
Interpretation
Noise versus error
Darwinian information
From noise to signal
Information emerging
Representation

14: EVOLUTION
Natural elimination
"Life's several powers"
Abiogenesis
The replicator's new clothes
Autogenic interpretation
Energetics to genetics
Falling into complexity

15: SELF
Starting small
Individuation
Selves made of selves
Neuronal self
Self-differentiation
The locus of agency
Evolution's answer to nominalism
The extentionless cogito

16: SENTIENCE
Missing the forest for the trees
Sentience versus intelligence
The complement to computation
Computing with meat
From organism to brain

17: CONSCIOUSNESS
The hierarchy of sentience
Emotion and energy
The thermodynamics of thought
Whence suffering?
Being here
Conclusion of the beginning

EPILOGUE
Nothing matters
The calculus of intentionality
Value
Glossary
Notes
References
Index