I deeply suspect that this has more than surface similarities with the observation that you cannot extract work from a uniform heat bath, but you can extract wo

I deeply suspect that this has more than surface similarities with the observation that you cannot extract work from a uniform heat bath, but you can extract work from a temperature gradient. There's probably not much an intelligence could learn to predict about its future environment living inside the core of the sun, even if it could withstand those temperatures -- just randomness everywhere in every direction. But on Earth, with the sun shining in and the coolness of space behind us, there are a lot of causal relationships that can be compressed to make useful predictions.