I see that there is much disagreement with this article but I could not find anything with which I seriously disagreed. I suspect most readers are pattern matching in that the arguments sound very dualist but they need not be; most of the piece's problems are more in phrasing and emphasis. While the core ideas offered within might not be known to the broader population, they are in line with current research. There are two aspects to the piece. One that appeals to math and another that is really arguing for a notion of distributed cognition.

The math portion is not well written but I don't know whether the fault lies in the article or the original book. Whatever the case, I can summarize more concretely: the idea is that life (and minds) are organizations of matter that more effectively leverage free energy in open systems out of equilibrium. This 4 min video narrated by Sean Carroll gives an accessible description. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxTnqKuNygE.

Much of the work in this area was jump started by Jarzynski, who notes non-equilibrium free energy plays a central role in the thermodynamics of processes involving the manipulation of information.

In http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/10/86/2013047... Friston argues that life "—is an inevitable and emergent property of any (ergodic) random dynamical system that possesses a Markov blanket". And in the work of Susanne Still, we see that all manner of systems, not just brains, are capable of some kind of predictive inference in order to operate at high energy efficiency.

the stall torque for the F1-ATPase [26] and the stall force for Myosin V [27] are near the maximal values possible given the free energy liberated by ATP hydrolysis and the sizes of their respective rotations and steps. These and many other biological functions require some correspondence between the environment and the systems that implement them. Therefore the memory of their instantiating systems must be nonzero

We have shown that any such system with nonzero memory must conduct predictive inference, at least implicitly, to approach maximal energetic efficiency

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The other aspect to the essay essentially was an argument for the Distributed Mind Hypothesis, which is certainly more philosophy than it is science. I nonetheless find the viewpoint most compelling.

Examples of Distributed and or Extended Minds

- Mutually Auto-completing Old married couples where recall of events is most accurate together.

- Experts at some task where the knowledge is distributed amongst workers because it is too subconscious to be reliably recorded as text.

- Proto cyborgs via mobile phones and laptops. As computers get more personal, the notion of the mind extending outside the brain will get less and less outlandish sounding.

- What makes up a person? After you remove the influence of genetics and interactions with books written by others and people met, what is left? Now this part is controversial but someday, we might find that the mind as a single self is a useful illusion but actually a highly correlated subcomponent of a more distributed concept in both space and time.

What to look for: Distributed Cognition, Extended Mind, Intelligence Augmentation