Wandering Towards a Goal: How Can Mindless Mathematical Laws Give Rise to Aims and Intention?

Introduction.- A Tale of Two Animats: What does it take to have goals? (Larissa Albantakis).- Meaning and Intentionality = Information + Evolution (Carlo Rovelli).- Von Neumann Minds: A Toy Model of Meaning in a Natural World (Jochen Szangolies).- Origin Gaps and the Eternal Sunshine of the Second-Order Pendulum (Simon DeDeo).- Agent Above, Atom Below: How agents causally emerge from their underlying microphysics (Erik P Hoel).- Bio from Bit (Sara Imari Walker).- I Think, Therefore I Think You Think I Am (Sophia Magnusdottir).- World without World: Observer-Dependent Physics (Dean Rickles).- The role of the observer in goal-directed behavior (Ines Samengo).- Wandering Towards Physics: Participatory Realism and the Co-Emergence of Lawfulness (Marc Séguin).- God's Dice and Einstein's Solids (Ian Durham).- Finding Structure in Science and Mathematics (Noson S. Yanofsky).- From Athena to AI: the past and future of intention in nature (Rick Searle).- No Ghost in the Machine (Alan M. Kadin).- The Man in a Tailcoat (Tommaso Bolognesi).- The Tablet of the Metalaw (Cristinel Stoica).- Wandering Towards a Goal: The Key Role of Biomolecules (George F. R. Ellis, Jonathan Kopel).