Assembly theory came to my attention from a podcast interview https://lexfridman.com/lee-cronin-3/. It seems to be something relevant to our scope of study. Learning can be a selection process of a computational system to fill some functional needs. But, some how such a system tends to become more complex as more is learned.
The recent paper referred is https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06600-9.