@aazad that's quite an initial reading list. lots of adjacent work in the "origin of life" problem, eg Walker's review paper and its citations https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsif.2012.0869 , work by Tononi's group on causation and the brain. You may also be interested in the project of the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis https://extendedevolutionarysynthesis.com/ in particular it's attention to reciprocal causation in evo dynamics.
What you're touching on is fundamentally transdisciplinary, so there's a lot of threads to pull :)