Yes I am familiar with Donald Hoffman! I hadn’t read his edge contribution, but his experiments, simulations and views regarding the evolution of ‘fitter’ perception (vs ‘truer’) have shaped some of my own views on the subject. Though Hoffman does then go quite far in a very different direction on his views regarding consciousness https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cijNBiopNRY :) (TLDR: consciousness doesn’t arise out of neuroscience; instead all of physics, chemistry, biology, neurobiology etc. arises out of the only fundamental entity in the universe: consciousness).

A lot of Daniel Dennett’s writings hint at a similar view to what I wrote about. But since writing this, the closest I’ve read is Peter Godfrey-Smiths’ “Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness”. The entire book is pretty much saying the exact same thing as this article (with much more information and much better articulated of course :)