Here he takes his ideas, I was going to say a step, but actually it is a giant leap, further forward, covering life, evolution, and the universe itself. And fortunately his prose style, although still slightly over-poetic in places for my personal taste, is a lot less purple than before. An autonomous agent is a self-reproducing system able to perform at least one thermodynamic work cycle. But simply getting a good definition of life isn't enough for Kauffman. Having covered life, and how it evolves, he next goes on to asking why evolution works.
Random search is as good as any other.
Kauffman doesn't like anything to be coincidence. In his final chapters he leaves biology, and ventures into economics and fundamental physics. In an evolving economic world, where new goods and services are forever coming into being, where the future goods available cannot be prespecified, the old ideas of equilibrium economics and clearing markets cannot hold. Bigger systems, more complex systems, decohere more rapidly, and hence preferentially come into classical existence. He then applies Feynman's idea of sums over histories and constructive quantum interference to explain why the universe has the laws and geometry it does.