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Comment by emanuer | Hacker News Reader

To anyone curious about the intimated interplay of entropy and life, I want to highly recommend the book:

The Romance of Reality: How the Universe Organizes Itself to Create Life, Consciousness, and Cosmic Complexity by Bobby Azarian

> When you empty a bathtub, why does a swirl form? → Because it is the most efficient way to increase entropy.

> The author argues in that life is very likely because it is the most efficient way to increase entropy in the universe.

I fear my words don't do the book justice, I found it very long, but just as illuminating, highly recommended.

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Related thread a week ago: 'Entropy: A little understood concept in physics [video]' https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36560104

I read "Hour of Our Delight: Cosmic Evolution, Order, and Complexity" by Hubert Reeves as a teenager which I can also recommend. That's how I learned about the low entropy sunlight converted to higher entropy IR radiation on earth, allowing complex life to exist without breaking the 2nd law of thermodynamics. So I was happy to see it talked about.

Now, life seen as an entropy-increasing system was a really interesting take on the topic! Until now my understanding was that it's the universe expansion that actually sorta decreased the local "entropy density" and allowed to radiate low entropy IR in the ever colder empty space in the first place.

> The author argues in that life is very likely because it is the most efficient way to increase entropy in the universe.

In the universe? You could argue life is the most efficient way to increase entropy within a local system ( like ants on a forest floor dissembling an insect carcass ), but I find it hard to believe life is the most efficient way to increase entropy in the entire universe. The assumed expansion of the universe itself increases entropy in a manner no life could ever hope to achieve.

What an excellent point. If it is addressed in the book, I don't remember.

If we actually accept that expansion increase in entropy, I do not know what could possibly compete with this.

I'll thank this recommendation by recommending The Gramatical Man: Information, Entropy, Language and Life by Jeremy Campbell. More or less same topics.

Did not read your suggestion yet, but the same concept is explained in "Every life is on fire" by Jeremy England.

Life: Inevitable or fluke? by Nick Lane https://nick-lane.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/Lane-New-Sc...

> The author argues in that life is very likely because it is the most efficient way to increase entropy in the universe

Why does the universe favour things that efficiently increase entropy?

> The author argues in that life is very likely because it is the most efficient way to increase entropy in the universe.

Shouldn't that be: to /decrease/ entropy locally?

A decrease locally, yes, but an increase overall.

A life form is definitely something I'd consider to be highly organized, i.e. low entropy, but that order is maintained via a greater relative increase of entropy by destroying and consuming other "instances" of low entropy (plants, animals, etc) for nutrition, which are they themselves sustained by disproportionate increases of entropy (consuming of other organisms, the sun doing its thing, etc).

So, as a life form tends to fight for its own survival -- survival being "just" a process of increasing entropy every else but the life form itself -- it is indeed an extremely efficient way of increasing entropy in the universe, in that is requires only a single point of decrease in order to cause a theoretically infinite instances of increase.

I suddenly feel an awful lot like a cow on my way to the slaughter indeed, and have the urge to go play Dark Souls.

So the swirl in the bathtub is alive according to this theory?

I don’t think that’s what they’re saying. They’re saying both a bathtub’s whirlpool and an organism’s energy consumption are examples of methods to increase entropy and both of them may emerge specifically because of the universe’s general tendency toward higher entropy.

How generic is computation?

Computers made of water, wind and wood... may be bubbling, sighing or quietly growing without our suspicion that such activities are tantamount to a turmoil of computation whose best description is itself. -- A. K. Dewdney, Computer Recreations [0]

[0] https://youtu.be/lWDTv4c_ITo?t=3731

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