Martyna Marciniak

This is really interesting. She explains how, through self-reference, she became the Pope. At least that's how I imagine López-Díaz and Gershenson would put it (see Semantic Closure).

See Emanuele Tesauro's 'Il cannocchiale aristotelico':

15:33 What she is referring to by the phrase pre-optical notions of vision is, I think, ideas such as that of Extramission, which seems to have been entertained by Euclid in his Optics!

I think the quote of Stanisław Lem she is referring to at 30:00 is this passage from Summa Technologiae, specifically the chapter Intelligence: An Accident or a Necessity?:

When it comes to changes that would knock an organism out of its environmental equilibrium by “programming” some unforeseeable instincts into it, the answer of the “first-order regulator” turns out to be unsatisfactory—which results in a crisis. On one hand, the mortality of non-adapted organisms suddenly increases, while at the same time, selection pressure privileges some new forms (mutants). This can eventually result in reactions that are necessary for survival being inscribed into “genetic programming.” On the other hand, an exceptional opportunity arises for organisms endowed with the “second-order regulator,” that is, the brain, which—depending on the situation—is capable of changing the “action plan” (“self-programming via learning”). There probably exists a particular type, speed, and sequence of changes (we could call this sequence “labyrinthine,” after the mazes in which scientists study the intelligence of animals, such as rats) that cannot be matched by the evolutionary plasticity of genetically determined regulators or instincts. This privileges the processes of the expansion of the central nervous system as a “second-order” homeostatic device, that is, as a system whose task consists in producing test models of various situations. The organism then either adapts to the altered environment (the rat learns how to find the exit from the maze) or adapts the environment to itself (man builds civilization)—and it does this “by itself,” [see Semantic Closure] without relying on any preprepared action plans. Naturally, there also exists a third possibility—that of losing, when, after having created an incorrect model of a situation, the organism does not achieve adaptation and becomes extinct. 

Amen! 

See https://www.martyna.digital/about.

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See also Susan Stepney - Life as a Cyber-bio-physical System.