Introduction.- A Tale of Two Animats: What does it take to have goals? (Larissa Albantakis).- Meaning and Intentionality = Information + Evolution (Carlo Rovelli).- Von Neumann Minds: A Toy Model of Meaning in a Natural World (Jochen Szangolies).- Origin Gaps and the Eternal Sunshine of the Second-Order Pendulum (Simon DeDeo).- Agent Above, Atom Below: How agents causally emerge from their underlying microphysics  (Erik P Hoel).- Bio from Bit  (Sara Imari Walker).- I Think, Therefore I Think You Think I Am (Sophia Magnusdottir).- World without World: Observer-Dependent Physics  (Dean Rickles).- The role of the observer in goal-directed behavior (Ines Samengo).- Wandering Towards Physics: Participatory Realism and the Co-Emergence of Lawfulness  (Marc Séguin).- God's Dice and Einstein's Solids (Ian Durham).-  Finding Structure in Science and Mathematics (Noson S. Yanofsky).- From Athena to AI: the past and future of intention in nature (Rick Searle).- No Ghost in the Machine (Alan M. Kadin).- The Man in a Tailcoat  (Tommaso Bolognesi).- The Tablet of the Metalaw (Cristinel Stoica).- Wandering Towards a Goal: The Key Role of Biomolecules (George F. R. Ellis, Jonathan Kopel).

This collection of prize-winning essays addresses the controversial question of how meaning and goals can emerge in a physical world governed by mathematical laws. What are the prerequisites for a system to have goals? What makes a physical process into a signal? Does eliminating the homunculus solve the problem? The three first-prize winners, Larissa Albantakis, Carlo Rovelli and Jochen Szangolies tackle exactly these challenges, while many other aspects (agency, the role of the observer, causality versus teleology, ghosts in the machine etc.) feature in the other award winning contributions. All contributions are accessible to non-specialists.
These seventeen stimulating and often entertaining essays are enhanced versions of the prize-winning entries to the FQXi essay competition in 2017.The Foundational Questions Institute, FQXi, catalyzes, supports, and disseminates research on questions at the foundations of physics and cosmology, particularly new frontiers and innovativeideas integral to a deep understanding of reality, but unlikely to be supported by conventional funding sources.