Thermodynamic View of Life

Discussion

Azrael:

"The thermodynamic worldview is a lens through which to understand organized information in the universe that is fully general: it applies at all scales from the chemical to the biological to the societal to the universal. This gives it tremendous power and allows us to see the full cosmic implications of what seem at first glance to be parochial human concerns.

The assumptions of the worldview are this: energy in the environment is unevenly distributed: in most places it is sparse, but there are pockets of concentrated energy (chemical, thermal, nuclear, etc). There exist replicating patterns of matter that harvest these pockets of energy in order to sustain and grow themselves, and to produce copies. Because almost all possible patterns of information do not have the property of being self-replicating, it must be the case that all successful replicators encode in their internal structure some information about their environment that allows them to harvest its energy, and some information about themselves that enables them to replicate.

Harvesting concentrated energy increases net entropy (very roughly - disorder, uniformity, flatness) in the environment. The pockets of concentrated energy are digested, after which the energy distribution of the universe is slightly more uniform. But - when the replicator is succeeding - entropy inside the replicating system is decreasing. The fact that it encodes information about its environment and itself (a tiny subset of all possible patterns) means it is in a low-entropy state. And this is exactly why it is able to function. What exactly constitutes “inside the system” is somewhat flexible. We can apply this lens at the level of a cell, organism, species, or entire ecosystem. Cells inevitably succumb to internal entropy and die, but the organism replaces them. Organisms succumb, but they are replaced by their children and other members of their species. Species perish, but they are replaced by species more adapted to their ecological niche.

Thus, we have a fully general picture of a living system: a pattern of organized matter that, via encoded information about its environment, harvests negentropy, increases its internal order, expels the resulting entropy, and produces copies of itself. Life is a sophisticated kind of fire, burning through available resources in order to convert more of the universe into itself."

(https://inferringtheattractor.substack.com/p/equality-the-grinning-mask-of-oblivion)