He is so often mocked but after actually reading his Cognitive-Theoretical Model of the Universe, it makes a lot of sense to me. Essentially the universe is meta-darwinian, constantly evolving and learning more about itself, self-determining its course.
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/537a/c9c6066f20039491a72b361a4009a3d5623f.pdf
>But there is another possibility after all: self-determinacy.
>The CTMU has a meta-Darwinian message: the universe evolves by hological self-replication and
self-selection. Furthermore, because the universe is natural, its self-selection amounts to a
cosmic form of natural selection. But by the nature of this selection process, it also bears
description as intelligent self-design (the universe is “intelligent” because this is precisely what it
must be in order to solve the problem of self-selection, the master-problem in terms of which lesser problems are necessarily formulated). This is unsurprising, for intelligence itself is a natural phenomenon that could never have emerged in humans and animals were it not already a latent property of the medium of emergence. An object does not displace its medium, but
embodies it and thus serves as an expression of its underlying syntactic properties. What is far more surprising, and far more disappointing, is the ideological conflict to which this has led. It seems that one group likes the term “intelligent” but is indifferent or hostile to the term “natural”, while the other likes “natural” but abhors “intelligent”. In some strange way, the whole controversy seems to hinge on terminology.
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/537a/c9c6066f20039491a72b361a4009a3d5623f.pdf
>But there is another possibility after all: self-determinacy.
>The CTMU has a meta-Darwinian message: the universe evolves by hological self-replication and
self-selection. Furthermore, because the universe is natural, its self-selection amounts to a
cosmic form of natural selection. But by the nature of this selection process, it also bears
description as intelligent self-design (the universe is “intelligent” because this is precisely what it
must be in order to solve the problem of self-selection, the master-problem in terms of which lesser problems are necessarily formulated). This is unsurprising, for intelligence itself is a natural phenomenon that could never have emerged in humans and animals were it not already a latent property of the medium of emergence. An object does not displace its medium, but
embodies it and thus serves as an expression of its underlying syntactic properties. What is far more surprising, and far more disappointing, is the ideological conflict to which this has led. It seems that one group likes the term “intelligent” but is indifferent or hostile to the term “natural”, while the other likes “natural” but abhors “intelligent”. In some strange way, the whole controversy seems to hinge on terminology.
