Book Excerpt from Every Life is On Fire

In an environment that looks random, but isn’t, it becomes particularly important to ask what it would mean behaviorally for a clump of driven matter to exhibit an emergent adaptation behavior in the presence of a subtle influence. If inexorable physical principles are biasing the gradual exploration of shape space, so that things have a specialized matching to a pattern whose nonrandomness is hard to discern, that means the dynamics of the matter in question has had to “figure out” something difficult about how to detect the pattern. If we had been given the task of discerning the pattern ourselves, either we would have had to engage in some form of intuition or abstract mathematical manipulation, or we would have had to write a computer program that could use numerical calculation to substitute for those activities. In any event, whether human or artificial, we’d be inclined to say some kind ...