Nice. I recommend the video as well to bounce through the proof. The relationship of cycle proofs to calculating the probability of life arising spontaneously seems interesting. It would be interesting to have someone like David Sinclair (twitter @davidasinclair) take a stab at this. Cycles may even relate the probability of death.

My own take from the perspective of computational cognitive neuroscience would go something like this. What if a solution to a successful perception or action (or both) in terms of neural network computations is in fact a cycle (i.e., completed feedback) in a field of hundreds of millions of possible neural discriminations (that I have called Psi functions, see https://medium.com/liecatcher/natural-language-and-your-brain-237185770b00). A human brain for example is expected to have hundreds of millions of such Psi functions which give us the ability we can observe in our natural language. What are the circumstances under which a successful cycle (for perception, for action, or for both) is highly likely? What if the evolutionary goal of a brain organization is to maximize the likelihood of such cycle success?

My guess is that this high likelihood of success is very high even for simple neuronal systems (simple brains). Natural language can describe anything, and rarely cannot, to a person’s ability to phrase sentences he believes describe what he perceives or does.

Like Tim for his DNA idea, I think this twist should be left to others to explore. But it sure would solve a lot of questions about what is called 'completeness' in computational cognitive neuroscience. And, perhaps, even consciousness.