Hi, Ganesh - I feel a bit like having 2 personalities, by writing here and also at your place. If the mapping between inputs and outputs loses no entropy, then it is injective (or has random components, which does not fit the idea of a goal). In injective mappings, the input is equal to the output, except perhaps for a reassignment of the names of the variables. I believe that an important characteristic of a goal is that it be flexible: the goal must be reached under multiple conditions, and circumvent obstacles. That is why I restrict goal seeking to non-injective mappings. In a way, the interesting computations are the ones where information is lost. Or to put it more constructively, where information is compressed, and you only keep the few aspects of the input data (or environment, or initial state, call it as you wish) that are relevant to achieving the goal. Very much related to your physical mechanism of learning. Any thoughts, for or against this argument?

Professor Ines,

Thank you for your kind words about my essay. You mention: "Do the forces of energy given off by plasma, a fourth stage of matter, in fact, about 99% of normal matter in the universe, replicate and restructure in the form of dark matter?" It seems like a wild speculative proposal and I don't think it has been proposed by those seeking the source of dark matter. Nevertheless, it represents the connection and utilization of mindless math laws and goal-oriented behavior.

I appreciate your interest in my ideas, considering some rate w/o reading, and I hope you rate them as highly as I did yours.

Jim Hoover

Dear Professor Ines Samengo,

Please excuse me for I have no intention of disparaging in any way any part of your essay.

I merely wish to point out that "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler." Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955) Physicist & Nobel Laureate.

Only nature could produce a reality so simple, a single cell amoeba could deal with it.

The real Universe must consist only of one unified visible infinite physical surface occurring in one infinite dimension, that am always illuminated by infinite non-surface light.

A more detailed explanation of natural reality can be found in my essay, SCORE ONE FOR SIMPLICITY. I do hope that you will read my essay and perhaps comment on its merit.

Joe Fisher, Realist

Dear Samengo,

Nice essay on Neuron sciences ,

Your ideas and thinking are excellent... "Observers learn how to observe, and they do so within the framework of learning theory [7]. They are first exposed to multiple examples of the process, that act as the training set."

..........................There are observers in our brain, one form picture of pen thro eye, another form a picture of a pen through touch etc... how they will coordinate with each other....?

Though my essay is not related to your topic I request you to please have a look at it....For your information Dynamic Universe model is totally based on experimental results. Here in Dynamic Universe Model Space is Space and time is time in cosmology level or in any level. In the classical general relativity, space and time are convertible in to each other.

Many papers and books on Dynamic Universe Model were published by the author on unsolved problems of present day Physics, for example 'Absolute Rest frame of reference is not necessary' (1994) , 'Multiple bending of light ray can create many images for one Galaxy: in our dynamic universe', About "SITA" simulations, 'Missing mass in Galaxy is NOT required', "New mathematics tensors without Differential and Integral equations", "Information, Reality and Relics of Cosmic Microwave Background", "Dynamic Universe Model explains the Discrepancies of Very-Long-Baseline Interferometry Observations.", in 2015 'Explaining Formation of Astronomical Jets Using Dynamic Universe Model, 'Explaining Pioneer anomaly', 'Explaining Near luminal velocities in Astronomical jets', 'Observation of super luminal neutrinos', 'Process of quenching in Galaxies due to formation of hole at the center of Galaxy, as its central densemass dries up', "Dynamic Universe Model Predicts the Trajectory of New Horizons Satellite Going to Pluto" etc., are some more papers from the Dynamic Universe model. Four Books also were published. Book1 shows Dynamic Universe Model is singularity free and body to collision free, Book 2, and Book 3 are explanation of equations of Dynamic Universe model. Book 4 deals about prediction and finding of Blue shifted Galaxies in the universe.

With axioms like... No Isotropy; No Homogeneity; No Space-time continuum; Non-uniform density of matter(Universe is lumpy); No singularities; No collisions between bodies; No Blackholes; No warm holes; No Bigbang; No repulsion between distant Galaxies; Non-empty Universe; No imaginary or negative time axis; No imaginary X, Y, Z axes; No differential and Integral Equations mathematically; No General Relativity and Model does not reduce to General Relativity on any condition; No Creation of matter like Bigbang or steady-state models; No many mini Bigbangs; No Missing Mass; No Dark matter; No Dark energy; No Bigbang generated CMB detected; No Multi-verses etc.

Many predictions of Dynamic Universe Model came true, like Blue shifted Galaxies and no dark matter. Dynamic Universe Model gave many results otherwise difficult to explain

Have a look at my essay on Dynamic Universe Model and its blog also where all my books and papers are available for free downloading...

http://vaksdynamicuniversemodel.blogspot.in/

Best wishes to your essay.

For your blessings please................

=snp. gupta

Dear Professor Ines Samengo,

Thank you for a delightful, creative and enjoyable essay. From your comment to me a few days ago I notice we share a few references that reveal a deep connection between thermodynamics and information processing. The perspective you provide on your multiple examples of goal directed behavior is thought provoking and have been wondering if there may ultimately be a fundamental connection with your conclusion and the measurement problem in quantum mechanics?

I just wanted to let you know I have voted for your essay - thank you again for the read.

Regards

Robert

    Wow, great question! Let me try to brainstorm a bit about it - all improvised, I confess.

    Indeed, the two situations seem to have some similarities. The Copenhagen interpretation of QM claims that observation collapses the wavefunction. The act of observation, hence, produces a new reality that would not be there, had no observation been made. In my essay, I claim that agents are also a creation of observers, and they would not be there, were there not an observer (endowed with a brain) producing it.

    Can we make an even stronger analogy? When an observer identifies an agent, he or she does not change anything in the outer world, they only change the representation of the outer world that they carry in their brain: by defining the limits of the agent, they make a decision of what exactly they will represent as a separate concept, and what they will discard. Collapsing the wavefunction, however, seems to be a more dramatic action. It seems to imply a change in the outer world, banishing the possibility of interference between the branches of the wavefunction that prior to the collapse were evolving together.

    Yet, within the Everett perspective, the collapse of the wavefunction loses the drama of the Copenhagen picture: All branches of the wavefunction continue to evolve, each one containing one version of the observer. So the collapse is no more than the view from inside-one-branch of an otherwise continuous process. The observer changes nothing of the outer picture, his or her experiments are just the result of perceiving a partial version of all what happens. But can we argue that evolving into one or other branch of the wavefunction is also a computation that brains cannot avoid performing, given the way they have evolved? Can we make the same claim as when observing purposeful agents?

    In this respect, I believe the two systems are somewhat different. The sole interaction between the measuring apparatus and the quantum system under study collapses the wavefunction (or branches it, within the Everett picture), irrespective of whether there is a brain or not in play. Of course, a brain can only evolve in a system that receives information about the outer world, and is capable of representing that information. So by all means, brains must be endowed with measuring devices (our sensory systems, at the very least). So my conclusion would be:

    - brains create agents when observing the world

    - all measuring devices (not just brains) that interact with a quantum system collapse the wavefunction

    - the sensory systems that a brain is fed with are examples of such devices.

    There is much more to say, I guess, actually this is an excellent question! I'll post this right now, but will keep thinking about it, these ideas are just my first draft of an answer.

    Is it not surprising that relativity, and QM, and thermodynamics all point out to an active role of the observer in what we so far had regarded as objective reality?

    So hey, thanks a lot, this is truly fun!

    ines.

    Ines,

    This is a very interesting argument, clearly stated. I don't doubt that you're right - "Goal-directed behavior does not exist if we do not define our variables in such a way as to bring goals into existence." Still, I feel this perspective is a bit one-sided. Though evolution is not goal-directed, it surely involves "a runaway escalation of sophistication," as you note.

    I think what may be missing here is that that the role of the "observer" is in a way played by the recursiveness of evolutionary processes. You say, for example, "Cell division seems to be a productive business because the waste products are not defined to be part of cells." But when cells divide, they create the conditions for more cells to divide. You make a good case that the waste products are important - and of course they may be food for other cells - but they don't pass on the information that keeps cellular replication going. So it's not an arbitrary choice to distinguish the cells from their waste. Similarly, members of a species that reproduce are distinguished from those that fail, even though the failures are also important, as the basis of natural selection.

    I think you must have had something like this in mind on page 7, where you discuss agency and "iterating the algorithm" to generate higher-level order. In any case, the aspect of the process you emphasize deserves more consideration, and you have a way of making profound statements strikingly simple - "A subsystem can only decrease its entropy if it somehow gets rid of initial conditions."

    I hope you'll be inclined at some point to look at my essay, on the role of recursive processes in quantum measurement, biological evolution and human communication. In any event, thanks for your very thoughtful and thought-provoking essay.

    Conrad

    Dear Conrad,

    Thanks! If I understand you correctly, what you are saying is that there is an objective way to define the variables of the system so as to produce agency. In my essay, subjectivity was the central character. But in the end, I argue that observers detect agency because they learn to do so, so there must be something in the outer world that makes agency learnable. I claimed that learning is guided by the need to be able to predict the future, for the evolutionary benefit of the observer. You, instead, point out that learnabiligy may be also be something that can be dictated by reasons that do not relate to the benefit of the observer. There may be something going on out there, that makes agents a natural concept because of the effect they produce in the system, and irrespective of observers. I think this is an interesting point.

    I still believe that brain-carrying subjects learn to ascribe agency for their own sake, but this need not the only way to ascribe agency. There could be for example computational/descriptive reasons. For example, we could ask: How should we define an agent (and its goal) so that the future evolution may be described with as few variables as possible, and as simple (and universal) rules as possible? Following the living cells (and not their wastes) allows us to keep telling the story (living cells replicate, wastes do not).

    This is not disconnected with my observer-centered story. In the end, observers also need to tell themselves a simple and an accurate story (that is the whole point of learning). But the new idea is that the problem of arrogating agency can also be formulated in terms of computational convenience, with no need of a "fitness function" for an observer. Nobody denies that observers need to be computationally efficient, but we need not always describe nature looking through their eyes.

    I hope to have interpreted your ideas correctly - let me know, if I haven't! In any case, I will surely continue to think along these lines. Excellent input!

    And I will look into your essay shortly, by all means. Best!

    inés.

      Inés, thanks very much for reading my essay - I'll respond to you also in that thread.

      As to your note above, "that there is an objective way to define the variables of the system so as to produce agency"... I would not put it quite that way. "Objective" implies that we're looking at nature from no point of view, as if we could be outside and "see" what every system really is in itself. From that standpoint, I agree that the cells and the waste products are all part of a single system. "Subjective" refers to the point of view of a story-telling brain-carrier... which is obviously important too - since we're the only ones who learn to grasp these things.

      But I suggest there's another point of view, relevant to QM as well as to the phenomena you discuss. For any given organism, there's a basic distinction between its long line of ancestors, each of which succeeded in replicating itself, and the vastly larger parts of the ecosystem that had no relevance to it. I don't mean that the organism thinks about this, but that this specific history is immanent in its genes and protoplasm. But this only continues to be significant if the organism itself reproduces, and its offspring do too, etc. If the line goes extinct, there's no longer a point of view from which there's a meaningful difference between the ancestors and the rest of the system.

      The connection with QM is that (as Carlo Rovelli says in his "Relational Quantum Mechanics" paper), there are only measurement results from the standpoint of each particular observer. These are not necessarily brain-carrying systems, but they must be able to define the result in some context... but also, to pass this information on, so it becomes relevant in some other measurement-context, etc. When the results cease to be relevant to any further observing, it's as though they were never determined - do you know the "quantum eraser" experiments?

      So objectively, the wave function of the universe doesn't collapse, as Everett says... but for us participants, not just the brain-carrying ones, there's a vast history of particular results that we depend on to exist.

      Instead of treating "meaningful information" as something objective, or as merely subjective, I relate it to the recursiveness of a process that keeps on opening up new opportunities for things to be meaningful. When we stand outside this history and consider things objectively, the contexts all merge together... we gain a more accurate view of facts, but lose sight of meanings. Objectively there is no rainbow, only sun and rain... but the rainbow is still "out there" as my camera attests.

      Dear Ines,

      I have now read more carefully your essay.

      Let me say that I find some of your thoughts rather original, and your prose quite effective, in most passages, in transmitting your ideas. The reading is mind-opening and amusing (e.g., the whole paragraph at the side of Figure 4). Often you manifest a talent for expressing your views by mental images that stick to the reader's imagination, and for carving simple sentences that help the reader navigating the logical development of the narrative (e.g. "We are demanding little of the world, and a lot of the observer. But does the evolving world not have organisational merits of its own?").

      Another merit, in my opinion, is that, in spite of some passages that would benefit from deeper explanations and perhaps more careful examples, the main idea is made rather clear, and repeated with different words a few times, thus contributing to deliver a solid message.

      Some remarks.

      1. The mess left on the ground by Menelaus for achieving his objective was indeed enormous, but in this example of goal achievement it is not immediately clear to me, as an observer in charge of 'creating' agents, where entropy reduction took place.

      2. You write: "In this essay, the distinction between micro and macro-states is not emphasized, because the phenomena we deal with are not always divisible into separate scales." But immediately after this sentence you write: "The notion of goal-oriented behavior that is used here always brings about an entropy reduction." Being used to definitions of entropy that are fundamentally based on the distinction between micro- and macro- (levels, variables), I find these sentences as potentially contradictory.

      3. I am afraid I found this passage (and its follow up) a bit obscure: "Once observers are in play, even if they might have never intended it, it turns out that the computation they perform is liable to iteration." Are you suggesting that the observers at level k decide to partition level (k-1) smartly enough as to let agents emerge within level (k-1), and that these (k-1)-agents produce the order used as fuel by the observers at level (k), which are in turn seen as agents by the observers at level (k+1)?

      4. "Here, noise is defined as the degrees of freedom that are irrelevant to predicting those features of the environment that affect the observer's fitness." This passage resonates with Rovelli's meaningful information (correlation between internal and external variables), as you may have already noticed. Another contact point with Rovelli: "Only if the initial location has proven to be arbitrary, and the traffic conditions variable, can goal-directed behavior be arrogated." A similar idea is pointed out also by him in his closing discussion on the modality of science.

      5. As you pointed out, I agree that also our essays are aligned on some aspects (e.g.: "We need an economic description, so we assign agency" is also a central point in my essay, where the economic description is referred to the 'goal').

      Best regards and good luck!

      Tommaso

      Hey, thanks again! I am aware (and fascinated!) by the quantum eraser experiments. I have not yet read, however, Carlo Rovelli's "Relational Quantum Mechanics" paper. I'll go through it, and then come back to you. I will then also answer the comments you posted at your essay, which I found very thought provoking. More soon!

      inés.

      Hi, Tommaso, thanks for the detailed and insightful comments!

      1. The mess left on the ground by Menelaus for achieving his objective was indeed enormous, but in this example of goal achievement it is not immediately clear to me, as an observer in charge of 'creating' agents, where entropy reduction took place.

      The entropy reduction of the bacterium is instantiated by the fact that no matter how nucleotides are arranged in the initial state, they become tidily arranged for DNA replication in the final state. The entropy reduction of Menelaus is larger. He manages to achieve DNA recombination not only irrespective of the initial spatial arrangement of molecules in Helen's womb, but also, irrespective of the initial location of Helen herself (Troy). Both he and the bacterium are able to circumvent obstacles, but his require an even more complex strategy. We are the observers of them both, and we evaluate the complexity of their strategies (I do not mean to say that complex strategies are always virtuous). Anyway, the need of all these explanations probably demonstrates that the example was far from optimal, I just meant to say that evolution makes goal-seeking agents increasingly complex.

      2. You write: "In this essay, the distinction between micro and macro-states is not emphasized, because the phenomena we deal with are not always divisible into separate scales." But immediately after this sentence you write: "The notion of goal-oriented behavior that is used here always brings about an entropy reduction." Being used to definitions of entropy that are fundamentally based on the distinction between micro- and macro- (levels, variables), I find these sentences as potentially contradictory.

      Sorry, I should have clarified that I am speaking of Shannon entropy (negative sum of pi log pi), which does not require a distinction between microscopic and macroscopic. I like to think of Shannon entropy as the mean number of binary questions (and answers) required to specify the state of the system. In the football example, the initial state is described by a probability distribution that is fairly uniform throughout the stadium, and the final state has a peak at the goal. This description does not require us to think at a more microscopic level, for example, of the atoms composing the football players, or the grass of the stadium, etc.

      3. I am afraid I found this passage (and its follow up) a bit obscure: "Once observers are in play, even if they might have never intended it, it turns out that the computation they perform is liable to iteration." Are you suggesting that the observers at level k decide to partition level (k-1) smartly enough as to let agents emerge within level (k-1), and that these (k-1)-agents produce the order used as fuel by the observers at level (k), which are in turn seen as agents by the observers at level (k+1)?

      Not really, it is not the process of arrogating agency that I meant to iterate at different levels, but rather, the agents created by one single observer (let us think of him/her as outside of the world that he/she observes). Nested agency is an effective and economic description of the world at different levels, because the same concept is applied repeatedly. The agent "prokaryote bacterium" is an effective representation to describe the biochemical processes that take place when one such bug is around (metabolism, replication, displacements, etc). It is also effective because there are many such bugs, so the same concept can be applied repeatedly at the same level. And finally, it is also effective because prokaryotes keep replicating, and the offspring become the fuel for higher-level bugs. The observer can then envision the "eukaryote bacterium" as the association of two prokaryote cells, one inside the other. In turn, the definition of the agent "eukaryote" is not only a compact description for what this bug does in its environment (metabolism, replication, etc.), but it is also a good fuel to construct multi-cellular organisms, and so forth. A smart detection of agents, hence, is not only useful to describe what happens at one single level, but also to construct a whole edifice of levels. Observers tend to search for descriptions of the world that are compact and efficient at the grand scale. Of course, my comments in the essay were way too short to make this idea explicit.

      4. "Here, noise is defined as the degrees of freedom that are irrelevant to predicting those features of the environment that affect the observer's fitness." This passage resonates with Rovelli's meaningful information (correlation between internal and external variables), as you may have already noticed. Another contact point with Rovelli: "Only if the initial location has proven to be arbitrary, and the traffic conditions variable, can goal-directed behavior be arrogated." A similar idea is pointed out also by him in his closing discussion on the modality of science.

      I was very fond of Rovelli's essay, so all such connections make me happy. His merit, however, was to nail all this down in just a simple formula.

      5. As you pointed out, I agree that also our essays are aligned on some aspects (e.g.: "We need an economic description, so we assign agency" is also a central point in my essay, where the economic description is referred to the 'goal').

      Yes, indeed, I was happy to see we had many points in common.

      Thanks again!

      Inés.

      Dear Ines Samengo

      I invite you and every physicist to read my work "TIME ORIGIN,DEFINITION AND EMPIRICAL MEANING FOR PHYSICISTS, Héctor Daniel Gianni ,I'm not a physicist.

      How people interested in "Time" could feel about related things to the subject.

      1) Intellectuals interested in Time issues usually have a nice and creative wander for the unknown.

      2) They usually enjoy this wander of their searches around it.

      3) For millenniums this wander has been shared by a lot of creative people around the world.

      4) What if suddenly, something considered quasi impossible to be found or discovered such as "Time" definition and experimental meaning confronts them?

      5) Their reaction would be like, something unbelievable,... a kind of disappointment, probably interpreted as a loss of wander.....

      6) ....worst than that, if we say that what was found or discovered wasn't a viable theory, but a proved fact.

      7) Then it would become offensive to be part of the millenary problem solution, instead of being a reason for happiness and satisfaction.

      8) The reader approach to the news would be paradoxically adverse.

      9) Instead, I think it should be a nice welcome to discovery, to be received with opened arms and considered to be read with full attention.

      11)Time "existence" is exclusive as a "measuring system", its physical existence can't be proved by science, as the "time system" is. Experimentally "time" is "movement", we can prove that, showing that with clocks we measure "constant and uniform" movement and not "the so called Time".

      12)The original "time manuscript" has 23 pages, my manuscript in this contest has only 9 pages.

      I share this brief with people interested in "time" and with physicists who have been in sore need of this issue for the last 50 or 60 years.

      Héctor

      Dear Ines Samengo

      Hi Ines,

      So first of all you have a lovely sense of langauge and if English is not your first langauge then that is really all the more impressive.

      The basics of thermodynamics and information theory we cleary agree on, and you do a great job with Maxwell's demon. I might steal some of your phrases next time I teach about it!

      OK and then you go and say something truly interesting and obviously true but just in a way that had never occurred to me before. Of course I knew that metabolism involves reducing entropy by exporting it to the environment, but I had never taken that additional step of noticing that this reverses our standard view of the relationship between information gains and enropy losses before, and the second I read that I started having lots of thoughts about how our minds operate, many of which you also discuss because it follows so naturally from that simple point.

      Would you agree with this heurstic assesment: it's as though open systems can gain information, paradoxically(?), by ignoring things. Abstracting, coarse-graining, tossing out details, assuming spherical cows and all the other kinds of approximations we make are information losses in one sense, but what we are really doing is tossing things out so that our internal possibilities are reduced, hence increasing the probabilities of certain 'rare' states from the perspective of our own phase space and thus constituting information increases for ourselves. Animals "pay attention" to the world, but in order to be good at this, they also actively ignore an immense amount of information available in their environment. For example, species in the jungle hear the mating calls of their fellow creatures like a siren above the din of all of the other noises that other species are using to transmit information through their environment.

      I always thought of that as being a result of the greater degree of mutual information between the two species, and that is another way to see it which should be mathematically identical. But I like this thought very much, that it is also a way for an open system to reduce it's entropy by selectively ignoring the much larger amount of meaningless information which pervades its environment. In a sense, the ability to hear the mating call above the rest of the noise can equivalently be seen as the ability to ignore the "noise." I mean, actually even in calling it noise I have already done that--it is all information, the "signals" and the "noise", so differentiating signals from noise is how open systems reduce their entropy.

      Is this a fair characterization of your point about "observers"? And finally, I think you would agree with this but some of the langauge in your essay left me wondering: anything that can perform a "measurement" is an observer, right? For example, as long as molecular recognition driven by nothing but thermal noise and structural mutual information is an act of "observation" just as much as when I read your writing is, then I agreee with literally everything you say.

      Great work!

      Joe

        Hello Inés,

        Thanks for a challenging and intricately reasoned paper, which is also well-written. My question is about the extent to which agency exists objectively in nature, before an observer imputes it to an entity. I understand that in your view "the interesting part of agency is the observer." Nonetheless, you do indicate on page 6 that entropy in the world does not increase uniformly. Rather, there are local areas where entropy decreases. This fact, as you say, "allows observers to create agents." Perhaps, however, in at least some cases the peculiar local conditions mean that the world itself is creating agents, independently of what observers do, and even in the absence of observers. This looks like an interesting question, whatever the answer might be.

        Laurence Hitterdale

          Joe, I agree with every word you say, and you phrase it all crystal clear - you are surely a good teacher! - so I am afraid there is little I can add. Apart from saying I'm happy to receive these comments from someone who can write so well, and who produced such an excellent essay himself.

          So good to know we are tuned!

          best!

          inés.

          I agree, the world provides the conditions for agency to be arrogateable. That is what I meant, in the essay, by "merits are shared". Indeed, the world has the merit of producing subsystems where entropy decreases. Moreover, those subsystems are repeated in space and time, and are nested in space and time. For example, if we choose a certain subsystem and declare it "prokaryote cell", it turns out that many such bugs exist. And they combine/evolve into other subsystems that can be called "eukaryote cell", that are also numerous. These, in turn, combine/evolve into multicellular organisms, and so forth. So not only entropy sometimes decreases locally, but does so following certain patterns, that are nested. All these are merits of the world, without which no observer could arrogate agency.

          Can we say agency exists without observers? This reminds me of the question "if a tree falls, and nobody hears it, does it make a sound?". Maybe yes, maybe no. The waves are there, the atoms are moving, but if nobody interprets them, I feel dubious. Agency only exists if we choose the right subsystem. Of course, the right subsystem can be detected by a brain, by a robot, by a computer program. Or by nobody: it exists in nature, even if nobody observes it. I surely admit its existence, and by all means, its existence is also an interesting topic, in fact many essays discuss the conditions required for its existence.

          I just decided to focus on the role of the observer, because I believe there are three interesting points to make. 1) arrogating agency is a compact and computationally efficient way to observe the world and make predictions, so observers actually benefit themselves of their observational powers (2) the ability to perform this computation can be understood as the product of evolution, and (3) the acquisition of this ability can be thought of, in turn, as a goal directed behavior itself (2 and 3 are very close to each other).

          I guess I just chose a sub-topic that was limited enough for me to develop a story that could fit in 9 pages :-)

          Thanks for your interest! best!

          inés.

          Thanks for your comments,

          Dear Inés,

          this was enjoyable to read. I think my analysis largely parallels yours -- plus, you framed it nicely! -- and we come to similar conclusions. You say "Goal-directed behavior does not exist if we do not define our variables in such a way as to bring goals into existence." with which I agree -- it's a matter of at which scales we describe the world. I'd add that in order to make sense of the macroscopic world, we have not much choice but to use these "variables" which "bring goals into existence". You turn the latter into a statement about our brain, its purpose and how it evolved, which also makes sense. In this last step I also see connections between your essay and Sofia Magnúsdóttir's contribution.

          Good luck, Stefan

            Thanks, Stefan, I've just read your essay and liked it a lot (comments there). And I was also very fond of Sophia's, I'm happy to see other people value her ideas too. Best!

            inés.

            Dear Ines,

            I estimate you essay exelent. Excellently written.

            You are one of the few who directly answers the question put by the contest.

            In my opinion, the "Maxwell's Demon" considered by you has an analog, in the form of a classical parametric resonance in a soliton wave, which operates on the principle of the action of a heat pump.

            You might also like reading my essay .

            Your essay allowed to consider us like-minded people.

            Kind regards,

            Vladimir