Edit — this refers to a previous draft which has since been improved — these points are less relevant than before, but I keep them here for reference (also because I’m not confident the text gives a sufficient understanding of the 2nd law).

Organisms are not remotely closed: they exchange chemicals, heat, and electromagnetic radiation with their surroundings.

Yes, there is a second law of thermodynamics. But even if there wasn't, living organisms would still need to eat in order to fashion more of the world into copies of themselves. The whole issue of thermodynamics is a red herring--or a narrative device, perhaps, but it's not meaningfully related to your conclusion. There's no antagonism, either--unless we're just reading off the minus sign in Gibbs Free Energy.

The part after this point is still a relevant criticism of the article.

That large brains that predict the environment are useful is not an obvious and easy conclusion from the to-most-people-mysterious phenomenon of the second law of thermodynamics. There are things that are far more plain ("survival") where the connection is far more obvious. Thermodynamics does no work to advance your thesis.

I also think it's generally unhelpful to make analogies between highly complex nonintuitive phenomena that nobody understands well and most people really don't understand at all, with other highly complex nonintuitive phenomena...where there is not even a direct mechanistic analogy at play.

The strongest analogy you can form is this: swerplets are like dsathaomir in that I have no idea what either is.

Indeed! Swerplets, dsathaomir, and consciousness. Three of a kind.