Hi Robin - thanks for commenting. Never apologize for a pun, I loved it.
In terms of purposive behavior and causal emergence; causal emergence can occur without purposive behavior. But I think purposive behavior couldn't exist without there being accompanying causal emergence. I hope it's clear that I think agents causally emerge, assisted by their purposive behavior.
I just read and voted for your essay, and I think it is actually a great overview of some really serious issues. Good to see Smolin, Krakauer, and Braitenberg all tied together in one essay. As to your question about ITI (which I had not heard of until now, so thank you), I remember meeting Krakauer in 2016 and he briefly said it was impossible for there to be any extra information at the macroscale (which, if you're only considering macroscales as zipped compressions is definitely true; however, the theory of causal emergence points out that they can be encodings, not just compressions) so I know he didn't have causal emergence in mind in defining ITI. However, I do think ITI sounds useful for defining the boundaries of systems (another choice is its anagram, IIT: Integrated Information Theory).
Thanks so much for your comment and your essay!
Erik P Hoel