thermodynamics. It is important to emphasize that information-driven interactions indeed do function on the basis of force-driven interactions between their components—what makes them different is how these purely physical components *are put together* in the interaction mechanism (the “informational architecture” of Walker et al., 2016). The important question of *when* a force-driven interaction becomes information-driven will be briefly addressed later.

The concept of “information” does not appear as an active, controlling agent in purely physical interaction processes in the Universe; it only appears there when a life system in general, or an *observer* in particular, intervene (see Roederer 2005, Chapter 5). In other words, “the world out there” works without information-processing—until a living system intervenes and changes the physical course. The above-mentioned beaver dam is an example. In physics, when we state that “a system of mass points follows a path of least action”, we do not mean that the system “possesses the necessary information to choose a path of minimum-action” from among infinite possibilities, but that it is *we* humans who have discovered *how* systems of mass points evolve and who developed a mathematical method applicable to all to predict or retrodict their motions. Similar arguments can be made 