"The fundamental problem about trying to define life... If you go to a physics department... you'll be given a definition in terms of matter... force... energy... entropy... free energy, molecular binding affinities, and so on. If you go to a biology department... you'll be given a very different narrative in terms of... instructions, transcription,, translation, coding, signals..."

“We want to know the transition zone between this demonic cut... from just bits of information... to this more complex form of global, or contextual, or functional information. ...azarding some guesses ...it might be a transition that would be measured by the integrated information, or... pathway complexity that Lee Cronin toyed with, or the breakdown of unitarity, if you think that this is associated in some way with the quantum classical transition.”

“Human beings have always been struck by the complex harmony and intricate organization of the physical world. The march of the heavenly bodies across the sky, the rhythms of the seasons, the pattern of a snowflake, the myriads of living creatures so well adapted to their environment – all these things seem too well arranged to be a mindless accident.”

“nformation... has been in physics for a long time, in the most obvious way with Maxwell's demon... It was... just a Gedanken-Experiment... in 1867, but just in recent years, engineers have built real Maxwell demons, and this is now something of a cottage industry.”

“t what point does information, in the physics of matter, cease to just be a thermodynamic issue, and become much more of a control issue? ...ne place ...is the. ...ow did this come into existence?”

“osmological limits of agency... hat's the best that the universe can do? There's about... 10100k bits of free energy out there. What could be achieved? ... been achieved... Maybe... astro-engineering... ake a galaxy that's rotating clockwise and make it rotate anti-clockwise? ...I suspect ...maybe yes. ...urn the expanding universe into a contracting universe? ...I'm sure the answer is no.”

“f you have a Maxwell demon or something like a Szilard engine in, could you use it, as Maxwell envisaged, to use information to extract energy from De Sitter space and... do... useful work? ... only if you can create a region of the De Sitter space that is screened out from that horizon... from that thermal nature. If you put a reflective barrier around the demon, you then have De Sitter space, but with the horizon screened out. ...hat's a problem I'm working on now ...”