This is a good, substantial comment on the topic of info theory, so I wanted to make a quick response before I depart. I’ve been meaning to for awhile, but kept forgetting, my apologies.
Your main argument is that duplicating A creates mutual information between A1 and A2. This is an interesting point, and I’ll get back to you with a response. On the face of it, it does seem to contradict the law of information non-growth, so there is possibly some error here. But, I cannot handwave things away, so I’ll come up with a formal resolution to this conundrum.
Regarding your other point about organisms learning the environmental information, I also suspect that learning about the information in environment E is limited by the information in A, since the environment itself is pretty uninformative, K(K(E)|E) = K(E). And at any rate, there is still a mass quantity of environmental information to explain, which results in the information regress I pointed out to you before, same as Dembski’s proof regarding the vertical no free lunch theorem. But, this point is good and deserves more than just a handwave, so I’ll work on a formal resolution here too.
Anyways, great points!