Over recent years, I've been musing internally about notions relating entropy, life, and social structures. Seems the shores we are now lapping upon are strongly suggesting a convergence. So, I'll go ahead and share some ideas here, albeit pretty far out, but as we may be reaching the point for some degree of operationalization, it may now make down-to-earth sense. This is a long post...but hopefully fruitful, with you being of like optimistic mind, for stimulating a higher level unified, generalized framework for our thinking...
First, a quick "in the beginning part" -- If we think about it, life forms in the universe are things that tend to directionally or "intentionally" counteract entropy in their own local space and time. That's my operational definition of living things. Very general. Notice it doesn't presuppose carbon, etc. -- those incarnations and instances likely just localized characteristics of life "as we know it" here. At this point, we only know of those on Earth, mostly carbon-based. My hypothesis is that the localized counter-entropy property is a universal characteristic or indicator of all life forms, something to look for in our search, no matter what the "matter" involved.
Schrödinger also formulated a similar set of ideas way back when. The idea here is that Schordinger's paradox suggested that life forms violate the second law of thermodynamics as they seemingly counteract the tendency of increasing entropy -- a known physical law. The pushback on that is that life forms do not operate as closed systems, as they obtain useful energy and resources from the surrounding environment and then discard their products of life externally back into that environment, in a more disorderly form, as a byproduct of maintaining their own internal order. This then nets out so that global entropy and output thermal energy still obey the physical laws. Not to get too much into the thermodynamic science of it, but that's the gist.
Now, reasoning by analogy, social structures exhibit similar behavior. While endeavoring towards self-preservation and further advancement, tribes, families, households, organizations, businesses, multinational corporations, governments, nations, empires and the like all do the same thing -- maximize and compete for input energy and resources while producing external outputs of higher entropy and of traditionally less concern to internal processes and operations. It's you who cares about your neighbor dumping garbage on your lawn, not so much your neighbor. For most of human history up to the near present, this "live and let die" or "ignorance of unintended consequences" has been the modus operandi of humanity, but at this point in our history it can no longer be.
What then is needed is greater influence, governance, meta-engineering, or whatever we want to call it that deals with these things we in the know call "externalities" -- the overlooked entropy shifted from the internal to the external in favor of promoting the internal. Life forms do it, and so do social structures. The structures grow via successively, fractally, expanding circles of empathy -- radii within which only the internal stakeholders care and outside which only the external impacted stakeholders care. Traditionally, only the former has been precisely measured and managed. We are now incubating a framework to enable and operationalize the latter to be precisely measured and managed as well, and to characterize the interactions between the interior and exterior. Serendipitously, as we recognize, the Fourth Industrial Revolution has ushered in the ability to quantify and actionalize such social entropy.
These new measurement and management capabilities then enable civilization to innovate going forward in such a way that future technologies and social arrangements developed best utilize free energy (in both the thermodynamic sense and being virtually free from our local star) to resources to do useful work that satisfies both civilizational needs -- transportation, construction, information processing, internal environmental controls, manufacturing, pastimes, and the like -- but also to optimally manage the entropy outputs of all those activities in such a way that their effects are not adverse -- to widen the circles so large that they don't negatively affect anyone, or at least as minimally as possible -- or, more ideally, cycle back as useful resources serving some other circle -- analogous to the symbiosis between plants and animals. New ideas and approaches such as "circularity" are along that axis. More generally, socially thermodynamic external entropy considerations can then be input to all decisions of action -- investments, innovations, structuring, building, deployment and the rest.
An additional analogy with life forms is the use of regenerative information (DNA in our local Earthly case) for propagation and generational preservation -- with this information property being a necessary condition for robustly perpetuating the ability to maintain complexity, counteracting entropy in localized space and time. This also applies to perpetuating social structures,.while its absence conversely causes degeneration (analogous to cancer) resulting from cultural malaise, loss of purpose, rudderlessness, and such -- counteracted by enabling information-driven reinvention and renewal like Darwinian adaptation through information management analogous to biological systems. We note, for example, that technology-centric companies are particularly better at doing this kind of thing.
That's enough for now. Thanks for indulging. One parting thought going even farther afield -- if all this isn't just restating the obvious in the eyes of those more scholarly in such areas, maybe ideas such as these can expand to a New Enlightenment, or Enlightenment 2.0, where the ideas from Enlightenment 1.0 (note also triggered by a Middle Ages following a pandemic) -- to a more equitably and rationally organized civilization, an artifact of intelligently widening realms of empathy with the goal of pushing adverse entropy out to regimes where the unintended consequences become infinitesimal or recircular. We can take the next quantum leap. Gotta think big!
Cheers,
-Greg
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