[marginalium]
Thermodynamics drives complexity?
28 Jan 2025
Does thermodynamics drive complexity? I wrote about Pinker using thermodynamics as a metaphor: ‘the ultimate purpose of life, mind, and human striving: to deploy energy and information to fight back the tide of entropy and carve out refuges of beneficial order’. Here’s Phillip Ball going into a bit more substantive depth:
there appears to be a kind of physics of things doing stuff, and evolving to do stuff. Meaning and intention — thought to be the defining characteristics of living systems — may then emerge naturally through the laws of thermodynamics and statistical mechanics …
one message that emerged very clearly was that, if there’s a kind of physics behind biological teleology and agency, it has something to do with the same concept that seems to have become installed at the heart of fundamental physics itself: information.
predicting the future seems to be essential (opens a new tab) for any energy-efficient system in a random, fluctuating environment … To acquire their remarkable efficiency, Still said, these devices must “implicitly construct concise representations of the world they have encountered so far, enabling them to anticipate what’s to come.”
Some other interesting stuff in there too. E.g.:
The thermodynamics of information copying dictates that there must be a trade-off between precision and energy (opens a new tab). An organism has a finite supply of energy, so errors necessarily accumulate over time. The organism then has to spend an increasingly large amount of energy to repair these errors. The renewal process eventually yields copies too flawed to function properly; death follows.
Anthologies: Betterment, Somatic Architecture, Thought Architecture, On the Nature of Things, Fragments