Lee Cronin's Assembly Theory offers a way to find alien life by quantifying molecular complexity. Using mass spectrometry, scientists can search for molecules with a high 'assembly index,' a clear signature that they were constructed by an evolutionary process rather than random chemistry.

Economics can be viewed as the physics of information, where profit is the surplus created when intelligent agents organize chaos into useful order (reduce entropy) faster than the system naturally decays back into disorder.

Drawing on a Jeff Bezos letter, the insight is that differentiation is survival. Every organism, person, and company must constantly expend energy to resist the universe's natural tendency to pull them back to the mean. To change or be different is to fight against a powerful equilibrium.

The small size of the human genome is a puzzle. The solution may be that evolution doesn't store a large "pre-trained model." Instead, it uses the limited genomic space to encode a complex set of reward and loss functions, which is a far more compact way to guide a powerful learning algorithm.

Evolution by natural selection is not a theory of how consciousness arose from matter. Instead, it's a theory that explains *why our interface is the way it is*. Our perceptions were shaped by fitness payoffs to help us survive *within the simulation*, not to perceive truth outside of it. The theory is valid, but its domain is the interface.

The fine-tuning of physical constants, which seems suspiciously perfect, can be explained not by a divine creator but by a programmer using a pre-existing physics model (like "Einstein's physics" from the Unreal Engine store) for a simulation.

Life itself is a process of transforming energy, which only happens when energy encounters resistance. Like a muscle growing against weight or a plant converting a photon, all biological and psychological growth—from learning to building strength—requires this fundamental principle of resistance.

The force of gravity is precisely tuned for life to exist. If it were slightly weaker, stars wouldn't ignite; slightly stronger, the universe would have collapsed. This 'Goldilocks' condition is so improbable that some scientists argue it suggests our universe is just one of many, most of which are sterile.

A more effective way to define life is not by its internal components (like RNA or metabolism) but by its unique capability. Life is any system that can recursively produce many identical copies of highly complex objects, a feat only achievable through evolution.