The Yoga of Entropy
The teacher said "S = k log W" and, after a delay for its model to converge, the student was enlightened
If you really “get” entropy, you will achieve yoga, i.e. union with the cosmos.
There is something of a paradox to be resolved here: The universe, a closed system, increases in entropy over time. Life seems to run the other direction. Organisms keep themselves alive by reducing their internal entropy. If your internal entropy increases too much, you will die. At first glance, then, it seems that understanding entropy means we should see life as being a pointless fight against inevitable death.
Yes, it’s true, organisms decrease entropy inside of themselves. Organisms use energy to keep their pH and salinity and temperature bound within certain ranges. They keep some molecules in and other molecules out. Organisms organize themselves. Entropy is the tendency towards disorder. Organisms reduce entropy to stay alive, but live in a universe where entropy increases. So you might see organisms as going the opposite direction as the universe itself. You’re not wrong. At all! But you are confused. Your confusion is that which yoga aims to help to alleviate you of.
The mistake you are making, the mistake most of us make, a very easy mistake to make, is thinking that you are your body, and where your body ends, you do, too.
Your confusion is identifying yourself solely with your organism. Your body.
Your organism organizing itself has the net effect of increasing entropy outside of your organism. If you see yourself as being just an organism, then yes, the universe conspires against you and will slowly kill you, boo hoo, we’re all gonna die.
But if you see yourself as being a symbiotic interplay between an organism and its environment, now the script flips: you are a thing the universe is doing, moving along the exact same direction as the universe itself. You increase the entropy of the universe, by lowering entropy in a tiny pocket of the universe. Your confusion is that you think you’re the pocket, instead of the pocket plus the environment around it.
You think you’re only the earth, instead of the earth plus the atmosphere, which doesn’t ever really end, it just kinda rambles itself out, slowly, until the boundary between it and not-it becomes ever more fine. And, to avoid what you think is your end, you hide underground, fearful of the atmosphere.
Of course your organism will die. But if you stop identifying with your organism, and identify with the pattern of “a tiny pocket of order that radiates disorder by organizing itself” well, that pattern endures forever.
You are a tiny pocket of order, radiating disorder outwards. The big bang is a tiny pocket of order, radiating disorder outwards too. Corporations, nation states, religions, homeowners associations, amoeba - those are all pockets of self-organization which, on net, increase the entropy of the universe.
The more you organize yourself, the more alive you become. The more alive you are, the more you radiate entropy - the tendency to disorder - out of yourself.
A Brief Scatological Digression to Illustrate the Point
My wife is very interested in poop. Most mommies are. Our daughter pooping big healthy poops is a great indicator of her health! As she eats more solid foods, her poops get even bigger and stinkier. Just like human beings, as we become healthier and more vibrant, will find and discover ever new ways of polluting our environment.
Cars saved us from cities full of horse shit by polluting the air. Social media saved us from corporate bullshit and replaced it with even more viral forms of nonsense.
This is the way of progress! Not “everything is better now”, more like “some old problems are less likely to kill us, but there are now new problems that we could never have imagined.” Just like cities reduce the odds we’d be massacred by a neighboring tribe, and increased the odds we’d be massacred by the authorities who claim to protect us, or die from germs and diseases. Just like your challenge as a parent goes from “eating sleeping and pooping take all your time and energy” to “they mostly take care of themselvs but occasionally present a thorny emotionally fraught puzzle with no obvious answer and all you can do is watch as someone you love seems to be suffocating themselves but you can’t get through to them because they don’t want to listen to you.” This is progress. If you can’t recognize progress as such, accepting its imperfections, you can’t contribute to it.
And if you think progress looks bad, my goodness, wait until you see what regress looks like.
The first organisms could only either die from starvation or maybe radiation. More advanced organisms have more elaborate ways they can die. I’ll be the future has some really juicy awful forms of suffering in store, along with amazing things too because that’s the way life goes. Progress doesn’t mean only making bad things go away, it means making good things grow, which sometimes reduces the old bad things, but also means new bad things come along and it’s fine.
Fear of nuclear power is what has us still stuck in the mode of using fossil fuels. Fear won’t help us grow. It can’t. The alternative to growth isn’t stasis, stability, calm, peace, and cleanliness - the alternative to growth is a slow decay starting in your 30s rather than a quick death in your 90’s. Those are your organisms only choices: how and where you are likely to die.
Of course, we’ll clean this place up. Just like we clean up our own houses; as my mind starts to become more organized, my house seems to follow. It seems to me that my house is a living organism that was created by other houses, who propagated their existence by fostering healthy families within them. A house reproduces by being a reasonably safe, reasonably predictable, reasonably low entropy space for children to learn to model and predict an environment. These children then grow up and learn to create order in their broader environment, which leads, ultimately, to the creation of more houses.
We call our kid’s diapers “gross domestic product” because they are, roughly speaking, a measure of consumption. Nothing to be ashamed of, just an indicator of how much we are growing. Of course it would be silly to try to make all our efforts at our daughter’s health focus only on increasing her poop. It would also be silly to try and prevent her from pooping due to the health risks and environmental hazards.
All that pollution we’re making here on the earth? It’s bad in the same way that poop is bad. You don’t really want to eat it, of course. Or drink it, or breathe it in. But holding our poop in, or eating less so we poop less - this is silly. The answer to pollution, the antidote to the disorder created by life, is to put that disorder somewhere that it’s not going to hurt us. The answer is to organize ourselves, at which point we will instinctively embrace our desire to keep going and growing by choosing not to be afraid.
If you organize your psyche, then your cells will get better at organizing your body.
Just as my efforts to organize my mind have caused my house to start organizing itself by means of me, if we human beings organize our own minds, soon Gaia will start ordering herself. That simply means we’ll push the disorder out further away from us. I’ll bet good bitcoins the earth will eventually be nice and tidy once we’re strip mining Jupiter’s moons. It’s fine, we’re going to be fine, all the fear of pollution is like fearing poop. It’s… not wrong, it’s just confused. It’s an attempt to avoid death which is never going to work.
The yoga of entropy is the belief that we are all tools in the hands of a greater, wiser intelligence than ourselves, in whose image we are made. The earth and the universe itself appear to exhibit the same kind of symmetry, pockets of order radiating entropy, and I’m willing to bet that the matryoshka doll pattern goes even further out than that.
You can’t fear death without also fearing life itself. You organism is going to die. That’s guaranteed. What isn’t guaranteed is whether or not you get a chance to live. The only way to really live is to organize yourself. This is true at every layer of the stack. Why should the operation of your conscious mind be any different?
Organism, organize thyself. You’ll be amazed at the result.
Wonderful. I love how you restate ancient truths in modern language, with all the weight of contemporary discoveries and insights behind them. Really puts meat on the bones.