thermodynamics, entropy and information
this is a first in a series about information, entropy and us. here’s today’s tune, on modern gaita transmontana by the band of some of the makers of my pipes, Roncos do Diabo. i’ll be posting with music and thoughts together, so you can have background music while you read.
of all the natural laws we learn in school (discovered through empirical evidence), there is usually a group of them that is regarded as ugly, inelegant or simply uninteresting.
thermodynamics, namely the second law, states in a crude way that entropy (or “disorder”) always increases in a system. there are a few exceptions to this but they are not relevant to our macroscopic everyday life (though they might be for our very existence, quantum fluctuations that is).
now, what is observed is that the more states are available to something, the bigger its entropy, and it’s a fact of nature that entropy increases. this is why you can’t open your fridge to cool down your house (in fact, you would end up heating it up), why you can’t “unbreak” an egg, and even more so, why time moves forward and not backward. consider the possible futures versus the single causal past. the future has much more entropy than the past (if i can put it this simply, what i just said is incredibly profound).
lurking in this is the notion first of thing and then of state. by thing usually we refer to atoms of a non reactive gas. but the thing can be expanded from that to any other “things” (after all, things are made of things, right?). take your bedroom for example. there are relatively few states for “clean”, but infinitely more states for “dirty”. that’s why your room ends up being dirty most of the time, and to keep it “clean” you need to work for it (more on this on a later post).
a state is no more than an “arrangement” of sorts. your socks in the drawer, your books in the shelf in alphabetical order. note that any state could be the clean state. the problem is that it would remain a single state, against the many possible places you could leave your socks and your books.
so entropy itself requires “minds” to assert whether a state exists or not, and whether it happened or not. nature itself has no mind to say which one is the ordered and which one is the disordered. we can use our minds to develop metrics to assert order and observe it exists (in surplus on earth for example). what is fed to us by nature is that order is both highly improbable and a requirement for complexity.
the study of entropy was mostly driven by industrial necessities and the development of engines. later, information theory emerged on an entirely different field of work: telecommunications.
information can be physically quantified (in bits), and bits themselves are things. so they are subject to entropy and order. take a book. any book. it is an arrangement of n things (letters) repeated m times (words, phrases, etc) where every thing must be in the right place, plus or minus a typo. if your letters are just 1 and 0, like everything online, you’re dealing with physical information (yes! information is physical and can be quantified!).
so communication itself must be subject to entropy. in fact, the two laws in their statistical definition are very similar. the reasoning i used here is not the usual one, it is a very simplified one. information theory and thermodynamics are very different with very different applications. what i’m writing about is the underlying fact, not the applicability of the specific laws.
i believe information, or ordered things, is strong enough of a concept to explain most of what is around us, including in complex systems like human beings, and the laws of entropy and energy are good enough to work with.
i know i’m risking generalizing too much but don’t see this as a simplification. i’m not saying human beings are information. that would be like saying a book is just a collection of letters from a to z. understanding underlying rules (like alphabets, grammar, etc) does not remove any value at all from the information itself (the books), and their emergent qualities (not all sequences of an alphabet hold ideas, only certain arrangements).
what i’m saying is we should accept the idea that things come to an end, permanently, by definition, and what we humans do, trying to reverse entropy all the time, building, surviving, fighting to be heard and remembered, is both useless and impossible.
it might be useless to paint a pretty portrait, but it doesn’t mean it can’t be beautiful. the japanese have a term for this kind of beauty, Mono no aware, an appreciation for the ephemeral beauty of things, and its bitter taste.
in a way, thanks to the 2nd law, we’re left with a universe permanently Mono no aware to us, leaving us in a permanent bitter awe, cooling asymptotically to absolute zero.
closing up with another tune, from Mono no Aware (an electronic music artist).