Meaningful information is reality in potential form; its actualization increases a system's negentropy. Biological evolution expands meaningful information by generating new coding systems (codepoiesis), where evolutionary changes gain functional value through interpretation that yields a meaningful function. Complexification corresponds to generating new meaningful information and developing new structures with functions. Each biological function has meaning within its environmental context, and the evolutionary search for new meanings establishes sustainable non-equilibrium as an attractor, maximizing power through synergistic effects. At higher organizational levels, innovations emerge as niche construction, behavioral choices, and cognition. The growth of meanings is part of an expanding information system formed by organisms, expanding greatly with consciousness, which incorporates the world's image into knowledge acquisition and enables global civilization.
Time is tied to actualization, physically interpreted as quantum measurement, which has a dual structure: external reality measured (physical time) and internal reality of the agent (duration, or Bergson's la durée). Internal time holds a coherent quantum state of entangled potentialities, while physical time represents the collapse of this state via quantum transactions, unifying Everett's Many-worlds and Copenhagen interpretations. Duration can be estimated via the energy-time uncertainty relation, linking measurement precision to energy dissipation and span. This precision enables quantum computation in autopoietic systems at sustainable non-equilibrium. Energy dissipation triggers collapse via emitted quanta, allowing higher-level control. The relation is proposed as a fundamental quantum constraint of natural computation spanning from enzymatic catalysis to consciousness.
Efim Liberman proposed in 1972 that living systems perform natural computation internally, guided by physical principles and constraints. Fundamental physical constants set universal limits, while biological systems have specific constraints that evolution can overcome. Biological macromolecules, especially the cytoskeleton, shape patterns formed during internal measurement in living systems. Cytoskeletal rearrangements drive cellular, morphogenetic, and perceptual transformations and participate in genetic events leading to evolutionary change. Neurons transmit signals via the cytoskeleton, producing digital outputs decoded by the perceiving agent. Liberman's principles of natural computation are fundamental to life and underpin theories of metabolic closure, morphogenesis, evolution, and consciousness.