Linas Vepstas
1 min readApr 28, 2017

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I like what you write, except that you got entropy wrong. You are thinking of the second law of thermodynamics, which deals with **closed** systems approaching equilibrium. Most of nature is anything but that: they are open systems, driven by energy flow, and in a driven dynamical system, there’s a huge amount of entropy extraction. A classic example is solar heating of Earth, which drives the water cycle (rain), which drives rivers, which drives the chemical and mechanical erosion of rocks, soils. As a result, rivers get twistier, they wind around. … etc. The idea is that nature seems to try to extract the *maximum possible* entropy from an energy flow. This is the MaxEnt principle. Its new, its only a few decades old, and is only poorly understood, and heavily argued about. But it, or something like it, describes most any driven system you can contemplate; by extension, this would apply to forms of entertainment. For example, the quest for entertainment powers the manufacture of the cell-phone, which powers Shenzhen, which powers the economy of China. The cell-phone is an excellent example of “anti-entropy”: it is not a random mixture of chemicals, but instead a highly ordered system. I expect more anti-entropy (i.e. highly-structured) systems appearing at ever-more abstract levels.

Best references I’ve got come from Axel Kleidon I can’t find my favorite, but try this: http://www.bgc-jena.mpg.de/bgc-theory/uploads/Pubs/2010-PhilTrans-AK.pdf

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