“An autonomous agent must be an autocatalytic system able to reproduce and able to perform one or more thermodynamic work cycles.”
pg 49
“One might be mistaken in saying that a chair is in the room, but one could hardly be mistaken in reporting bits and pieces of one’s own awareness. For example ‘I am having the experience of a brown color’; ‘I am aware of the the note A-flat.’ These statements were thought to record sense data and to be less susceptible to error than statements about the ‘external world’ of chairs, rocks, and legal systems. Logical atomism sought to reconstruct statements about the external world from logical combinations of atomic statements about sense data.”
Our awareness, and thus our thoughts, are completely dependent on what we receive from sensory functions. So an agent, which has sensors and some limited ability to perceive its environment, can be said to have awareness, and thus capable of thinking, albeit at an abstracted level.
pg 51
fitness – “an increased expected number of offspring”
pg 52
Source https://books.google.com/books?id=ZUMrZrJ4M1EC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false