Why Everything in the Universe Turns More Complex | Hacker News Reader

Why Everything in the Universe Turns More Complex

quantamagazine.org

149 pointskonradx98 comments

Tried reading the paper [1]. I understand the authors are academics, which is why I'm surprised the paper reads like a layman's attempt at a contributing to a "theory of everything", or at best, an inquiry written by a 18th century European philosopher of science.

- "identification of conceptual equivalencies among disparate phenomena were foundational to developing previous laws of nature" - what exactly is a "conceptual equivalence"? You mean models? Unifying disparate observations into models is basic science. Not sure why it is highlighted here as some important insight.

- "The laws of classical physics emerged as efforts to provide comprehensive, predictive explanations of phenomena in the macroscopic world" - followed by a laymen's listing of physical laws, then goes on to claim "conspicuously absent is a law of increasing “complexity.”"

- then a jumble of examples including gravitation, stellar evolution, mineral evolution and biological evolution

- this just feels like a slight generalization of evolution: "Systems of many interacting agents display an increase in diversity, distribution, and/or patterned behavior when numerous configurations of the system are subject to selective pressure."

At this point, I gave up.

[1] https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2310223120

I think speculative science always starts out as philosophy. This is as true now as it was in the 18th century. If you look at any thinker on the edge of human understanding you'll find something similar (e.g. I was reading Michael Levin's stuff on bioelectricity recently and it also has a heavy dose of philosophy).

I don't really have an issue with any of the points you raised - why do they bother you?

The interesting stuff is the discussion about "functional information" later in the paper, which is their proposed quantitative measure for understanding the evolution of complexity (although it seems like early stages for the theory).

It's "just" a slight generalisation of the ideas of evolution but it applies to nonbiological systems and they can make quantitative predictions. If it turns out to be true then (for me) that is a pretty radical discovery.

I'm looking forward to seeing what can be demonstrated experimentally (the quanta article suggests there is some evidence now, but I haven't yet dug into it).

> I think speculative science always starts out as philosophy. This is as true now as it was in the 18th century.

Indeed, and Natural Philosophy was the precursor to what we now call Science.

I still think the old name better fit what we’re doing because it admits that the work is still a philosophical endeavor.

This is not to question the validity of what we now call science, but it’s common these days to believe in the ultimate supremacy of science as the answer to questions that are best explored both philosophically and scientifically, and because pure science still can’t answer important philosophical questions that that the entire scientific discipline rests upon.

Tell me about the supremacy of science after the government restores the NIH, NOAA, etc. In fact most people in the world believe in the supremacy of their religious faiths.

You're describing anti-science sentiment, which is problematic and dangerous. But this is also whataboutism.

I'm describing unfounded beliefs many people hold about science based mostly on a lack of philosophical understanding, which is orthogonal to anti-science sentiment and still important to examine.

I don't see a reason for there to be tension between the two.

I may have overreacted. I'm a scientist, and I'm surrounded by scientists. When I hear about "supremacy of science" it's usually being presented as a straw man. I don't know any scientists who believe it, beyond the temporary phase in everybody's education where they get caught up in the "master of the universe" feeling.

That’s understandable, especially in the current climate. I’ve definitely encountered the straw men from the anti-science types too, and it’s incredibly frustrating.

As a layperson, I often come in contact with people who believe in science but fall into what is essentially scientific absolutism and see philosophy as irrelevant. I was one of those people in my 20s before I went down some rabbit holes that set me straight. Many of the people around me did not.

The scientists I know are not the absolutist types. I sometimes forget there are more scientists here than the average internet community.

My religious faith is science

now what?

I'm open minded about religion. It can be whatever you want.

> I think speculative science always starts out as philosophy

or in my words: "the first approximation is poetic. the last one is mathematical"

from philosophy to hard-science and engineered tooling and other products (andor services)

similarly to

from poetry as dubious, cloudy, and vague ideas all the way to crystal clear, fixed and unmoving (dead) formalizations

> I don't really have an issue with any of the points you raised - why do they bother you?

Idk about GP, but bad science writing ("identification of conceptual equivalencies ...") does bother me. It's sloppy, and tends to hide possibly invalid shortcuts taken by the authors by being an impenetrable fog of words. That sort of thing is a very good indicator of bunk, and it tends to peg my BS meter. Which isn't to say that there is no place for that sort of language in a scientific paper, but that one should preface the use of it with an admission of hand-waving for some purpose.

Right, I agree with you in general but in this particular case it seems fine to me. OP refers to the first two paragraphs of the introdution, so the authors clearly aren't hiding anything. It's a very far cry from an actual crank paper like the sort you see on vixra. But yeah, this stuff is subjective, I probably just have a higher tolerance for fluff.

I think you should try to get the intent instead of stumbling on surface level. The core idea is that recursion explains emergence.

A distributed system can still achieve centralized outcomes as a result of centralizing constraints acting on it. For example, matter under gravity forces leads to celestial bodies, particles under EM forces lead to stable chemical molecules, genes and species under the constraint of replication lead to evolution, language under constraint of usage leads to the evolution of culture, and brains under the constraint of serial action lead to centralized semantics and behavior. In neural nets we have the loss function as a centralizing constraint, moving weights towards achieving a certain functional outcome.

Ok, so what is the relation between centralizing constraints and recursion? Recursion is how distributed activity generates constraints. Every action becomes a future constraint. I think this approach shows great promise. We can link recursive incompressibility and undecidability to explanatory gaps. You can't know a recursive process unless you walk the full path of recursion, you have to be it to know it. There is no shorter description of a recursive process than its full history.

So what looks like constraints when seen top-down, looks like search seen bottom-up. Particles search for minimal energy, genes for survival, markets search for profit, and our actions for goal maximization. Search acts on all levels, but since constraints are emergent, search is also open-ended.

Your comment reminded me of this article. It suggested that we experience time because the underlying processes of the universe are recursive. And since our computational capacity is limited, we as observers can only perceive the future by progressively unfolding it. If recursion explains emergence, could it follow that everything tends to grow more complex over time?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41782534

I believe model and concept can be equivalent, not sure about the required formal terminology in English.

Complexity is probably most formally modeled in entroy in thermodynamics, although it behaves in the opposite direction that these ideas and oberservations suggest it should.

It still asks questions about the reason for this complexity and there is no scientific answer aside from "propably accidental complexity".

Science is curious so it probably shouldn't be dismissed by unmet formal requirements that aren't specified. "Layman" is unspecific, so what would your requirements be exactly?

>- "identification of conceptual equivalencies among disparate phenomena were foundational to developing previous laws of nature" - what exactly is a "conceptual equivalence"? You mean models?

No, a model is not an "identification of conceptual equivalencies among disparate phenomena". It's a simplified representation of a system.

"identification of conceptual equivalencies among disparate phenomena were foundational to developing previous laws of nature" could be called an analogy, an isomorphism, a unifying framework, etc.

>Unifying disparate observations into models is basic science. Not sure why it is highlighted here as some important insight.

Perhaps because the most important insights are the most basic ones - it's upon those eveything else sits upon.

>At this point, I gave up

If you can't bother beyond the abstract or 1st paragraph, or are perplexed that the abstract has a 10,000ft simplistic introduction into the basics, then it's better that you did :)

"Complexity" is a hugely problematic term when used in this way - remember that entropy and complexity are related, but they are not interchangeable. A complex system can have lower entropy than a simpler system, and conversely, a system can have high entropy but be relatively simple. By mingling these terms without specifying objective reference points, it all just comes out as word salad.

This paper just reads like an attempt at sounding smart while actually saying little.

> a system can have high entropy but be relatively simple.

Good examples of these are anything that Kolmogorov-compresses well. For example, by almost any measure the output of a pseudo random number generator has high entropy. Yet it has low information density (low complexity), as the program that generates the sequence, plus its state, is really small.

I think a better example is just hot gas. Heat up a tube of gas, and its entropy will increase, with no effect on its complexity. Still not terribly compressible either though.

Yes indeed. As I understand it, entropy is about states that are more likely.

I wonder if it always increases though? Eventually there will be enough entropy that any change may cause it to reduce or oscillate? (At universe / reachable universe scale).

> I wonder if it always increases though?

It always increases in an isolated system. That caveat is almost always missing in pop-sci level of discussions about entropy, but it is crucial.

> Eventually there will be enough entropy that any change may cause it to reduce or oscillate?

Assuming that the universe is actually an isolated system, entropy will reach a maximum (it cannot oscillate). It is interesting to speculate, and of course our theories are imperfect and we are certainly missing something. In particular, the relationship between time and entropy is not straightforward. Very roughly: is the entropy a function of time, which we could define otherwise, or is time a consequence of entropy changes?

In the first case, we can suppose that if the universe reaches an entropy maximum we’d be far enough outside the conditions under which our theories work that we’d just have entropy decrease with time (i.e., the rule that entropy increases with time is only valid close to our usual conditions).

But in the second case, it would mean that the universe reached the end of time. It could evolve in any conceivable way (in terms of the fundamental laws of Physics), and the arrow of time would always point to the same moment. "What comes after?" Would be a question just as meaningless as "what came before the Big Bang?"

In any case, there are a lot of assumptions and uncertainty. The story does not do the subject any justice.

Yes, we call that state "heat death". Note that the second law is actually that entropy never decreases; it's allowed to stay constant for certain interactions (for instance I'm pretty sure an elastic collision preserves entropy).

that is why the complex is distinct from the complicated

Coincidentally, I'm reading Walker's book "Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life's Emergence" on the same topic. (Walker is one of the researchers in the article.) Summary: I don't like the book. The book was motivating me to write an article "Books I don't like", but I'll comment here instead :-)

The book describes "Assembly Theory", a theory of how life can arise in the universe. The idea is that you can quantitatively measure the complexity of objects (especially chemicals) by the number of recursive steps to create them. (The molecule ATP is 21 for instance.) You need life to create anything over 15; the idea of life is it contains information that can create structures more complex than what can be created randomly. The important thing about life is that it isn't spontaneous, but forms an unbroken chain through time. Explaining how it started may require new physics.

If the above seems unclear, it's because it is unclear to me. The book doesn't do a good job of explaining things. It looks like a mass-market science book, but I found it very confusing. For instance, it's unclear where the number 21 for ATP comes from, although there's an analogy to LEGO. The book doesn't define things and goes into many, many tangents. The author is very, very enthusiastic about the ideas but reading the book is like looking at ideas through a cloud of vagueness.

The writing is also extremely quirky. Everyone is on a first-name basis, from Albert (Einstein) to Johnny (von Neumann) and Erwin (Schrödinger). One chapter is written in the second person, and "you" turn out to be "Albert." The book pushes the idea that physics is great and can solve everything, covering physics "greatest hits" from relativity and quantum mechanics to gravitational waves and the Higgs boson. (The underlying theme is: "Physics is great. This book is physics. Therefore, this book is great.") The book has a lot of discussion of how it is a new paradigm, Kuhn's paradigm shifts, how it will move astrobiology beyond the pre-paradigmatic phase and unify fields of research and so forth. It's not a crackpot book, but there are an uncomfortable number of crackpot red flags.

I'm not rejecting the idea of assembly theory. To be honest, after reading the book, I don't understand it well enough to say which parts seem good and which parts seem flawed. There seem to be interesting ideas struggling to get out but I'm not getting them. (I don't like to be negative about books, but there are a few that I regret reading and feel that I should warn people.)

Walker gave a talk recently at Long Now on Assembly Theory that sounds like it did a better job of getting the point across:

https://longnow.org/ideas/informational-theory-life/

I felt similar reading that book. She seems very clear that she wants to develop paradigmatic physics, and wants Assembly Theory to be paradigmatic, but there's not a lot of meat on the bone.

> It's not a crackpot book, but there are an uncomfortable number of crackpot red flags.

How do you know it's not a crackpot book? All evidence you mentioned here seems to support that conclusion.

Douglas Adams was right all along then.

"There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened."

Fancier but less humorous take by "experts" (including Goedel):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modal_collapse

Amateur speculation, but informed by professionals: I think this tendency toward complexity is situational, not fundamental. Specifically, it's a product of this stage of the universe having lots of available energy. More complex structures are favored when/because they can consume more energy and increase entropy more effectively. The complexity will probably start fading when the hydrogen-fusion party dies. The second law will continue on its way.

I'm fairly sure this is already in the usual canon of statistical mechanics.

"When one compares a hotplate with and without a Benard cell apparatus on top, there is an overall increase in entropy as energy passes through the system as required by the second law, because the increase in entropy in the environment (at the heat sink) is greater than the decreases in entropy that come about by maintaining gradients within the Benard cell system."

The abstract heresy innuendo'd here seems to be about an increase in global (aka universal) "complexity"*

(Think: no heat death!)

Related to another heresy understated by qmag just this week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43665831

In that case, qmag didn't (dare to?) shout loud enough that the para-particles are globally ?distinguishable..

That's like a very restricted version of TFA's claim though..

Another take on the issue:

https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=762

*I don't want to say "entropy" because it's not clear to many folks, including experts, whether entropy is uh, "correlated" or "anticorrelated" with complexity.

> "correlated" or "anticorrelated" with complexity.

Also the value of entropy has different signs in thermodynamics and computer science for example. Not helpful either...

It's because thermo count states and CS use probabilities.. strange swap, I know, pple assume the opposite..

This reminds me of Teilhard de Chardin's take on complexification, as laid out in his seminal book Le Phénomène humain. See e.g., this article[0] for a simple overview of the hypothesis. For further reading, I recommend the excellent new translation by Sarah Appleton-Weber, The Human Phenomenon[1].

[0] <https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/%28SICI%2910...>

[1] <https://www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/doi/book/10.3828/...>

I never trust the sense of new scientific ideas I get from popular press articles. But this comes across as highly questionable, “Intelligent Design” redux stuff. Sure there are some interesting points about information theory etc, but overall it sounds like a lot of scientists desperately cribbing concepts they don’t actually understand from other fields and misapplying them to oversimplified computer simulations someone who barely understands Python wrote 20 years ago, and assuming the simulation, which has built-in, accidentally hard-coded selection factors, is the same as reality.

Seriously, phrases like “selection for function”, unified theories of biology and physics, and big ideas about the second law of thermodynamics are major red flags.

Sentences like this, i.e. "everything turns more complex", must be formulated much more precisely in order to become true.

The article talks a lot about biological evolution, but in that case the only claim that is likely to be true is that the complexity of the entire biosphere increases continuously, unless a catastrophe resets the biosphere to a lower complexity.

If you look only at a small part of the biosphere, like one species of living beings, it is extremely frequent to see that it evolves to become simpler, not more complex, because a simpler structure is usually optimal for constant environmental conditions, the more complex structures are mainly beneficial for avoiding extinction when the environmental conditions change.

“The law that entropy always increases holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell's equations - then so much the worse for Maxwell's equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation - well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the Second Law of Thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it to collapse in deepest humiliation.” ― Arthur Eddington, New Pathways in Science

Entropy is always increasing in a closed system, but locally it can decrease, if energy is supplied from the outside. Us evolving on Earth comes at the expense of increased entropy of the Sun.

> Entropy is always increasing in a closed system

Only if that system isn’t already in thermodynamic equilibrium. A closed system that reaches thermodynamic equilibrium has maximum entropy.

Why the universe as a whole didn’t start out in thermodynamic equilibrium, i.e doesn’t have maximum entropy is something we don’t understand.

Maybe it's not a closed system.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole_cosmology

I'm partial to the hypothesis that our universe is actually a giant black hole in some kind of larger universe. The Big Bang was really the formation of our universe's event horizon. Cosmic inflation is the result of stuff falling into our universe, adding to its mass-energy -- there is no dark energy, our universe is just accreting mass-energy from something larger.

As for what the larger universe looks like -- in this model it may be impossible to know because the event horizon is impenetrable. It could be a much larger universe or it could be something else, like a higher dimensional one.

If it were so, there would be no one to ask that question.

I read a theory that life in the universe might be favorable because we increase entropy so much.

Life in the universe is pretty unfavourable! A rare thing indeed. Where it has evolved I think it is less about entropy and more about the nature of the matter - atoms, molecules. Particularly carbon and water. And the way they can replicate themselves through chemistry. That had to obey entropy but is not driven by it. Light scattering off the atmosphere will do the entropy trick well enough!

> A rare thing indeed

We can hardly know that, can we? Water and carbon are abundant.

I remember reading somewhere that maybe the purpose of life is to increase entropy in the universe. If that is true and we haven't found any sound evidence of life elsewhere, I don't know.

Where did you read this? "Purpose" is a very loaded word. If life has any purpose at all, it's to reproduce and propagate one's genes. Additional entropy just sounds like an inevitable side-effect of that.

"to reproduce and populate its genes" feels like a better fit for the purpose of an organism.

If you subscribe to the big bang theory (and the idea that the purpose of a system is what it does), then the universe's purpose is to walk a path from low entropy to high entropy. Of what use is life, in such an endeavor? Well, life tends to seek out bits of stuck energy (food/fuel) and release it (metabolism/economy)--moving the universe further along on its path.

This gives a sort of answer to the question: "why bother have live at all?" And so I think the entropy purpose makes sense--moreso than just having it just be a side effect. Nobody will ever be absolutely right or wrong about such things (purposes), but they're handy to have around sometimes.

Can life evolve to slow down the process of increasing entropy? For ex: Sun is throwing energy in space. What if life tries to store it and use it only when it needs? Has the sunlight gone into space (without being captured by fossilized life), it would have thinly spread out in universe(high entropy, low energy density). But plants and humans (solar cells) capturing it to create fossil fules or create some infrastructure... Is it not life going against this theory? Or is it just intermidiate step of life which eventually (life will) blast all energy in short period of time at the end like an expontial system does?

Certainly. If you look at the various steps in cellular respiration (happens in animals, starts with glucose and ends up with ATP) you'll see that it takes many of them to gradually release that energy such that it can be made use of at a rate that jives with the cell's needs. There's so much complexity that has gone into controlling this rate. It would've been much simpler to just burn it all at once and explode.

What I find compelling is how it works at low and high levels. Low level because we dissipate energy just by being a living creature. And the high level because as you said, we as a civilization can't seem to escape it, and want to use pockets of low entropy like mineral veins and fuels. Until all is spent i guess. You don't mention how unsympathetic that purpose is, though. At that point any purpose you make for yourself is better than that one even if it's true.

> At that point any purpose you make for yourself is better than that one even if it's true.

Absolutely, let's not let thermodynamics be the final word on the topic.

But suppose we did... To anybody who would cite this as a reason to drill more oil, I'd say that part of the equation is that we must also survive. In 10k years there will still be plenty of useful sunlight falling on the planet. Ideally we'll be around then, harnessing it to throw really great parties or whatever. If we aren't choosy about our fuel sources in the near term we might not be around to continue at this purpose in the long term.

I wouldn't be so sure. You'd still need to mine for the batteries and the rest of the infrastructure.... And then plastics also dissipate into micro and nanoplastics possibly robbing life of vitality. But again, this involves predicting things that never happened yet, so I might be very wrong for reasons I don't consider.

Oh I'm not trying to make any claims about any type of energy infrastructure in particular.

I'm just saying that even if the game is merely to contribute as much as possible to this Big Bang that we're living in, we're still gonna lose if we focus on short term gains a the expense of our survival.

Stafford Beers, "The Purpose of a System is What it Does (POSIWID)", very hot right now..

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/come-on-obviously-the-purpo...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...

When Beers says:

> According to the cybernetician the purpose of a system is what it does...

The "according to the cybernetician" part makes it pretty clear that we're now entering some kind of abstract space that cares not for the stated intentions of humans. It seems that what's "very hot right now" is to ignore the first part.

I think it's an especially reasonable position to take when the system in question has no designer to disagree with anyhow.

> we're now entering some kind of abstract space that cares not for the stated intentions of humans

But that's the thing about systems: they may involve humans but they don't necessarily reflect the intentions of the individual humans involved. Even when a system is created with a stated intent (i.e. for a stated purpose) that doesn't mean it will actually behave in a way that aligns with this intent. Logically you then shouldn't take the human intent into consideration when analyzing a system's actual effects and outcomes (except to determine whether it aligns with those but that's secondary).

IOW the purpose of a system (i.e. "what it exists for") can be different from the purpose for which it was created (i.e. "what it is meant to do"). I guess "purpose" in this case is an overloaded term because the former more uses a meaning that more closely aligns with "function" (like the function of a predator in an ecosystem may be controlling prey population but that doesn't suggest intent nor design) and the latter uses a meaning that more closely aligns with "intent" (like during wildfires controlled burns are performed with the intent of stopping the spread of the wildfire).

But I'd say it's a stretch to apply this to statements like "the purpose of organisms is to increase entropy" because that strongly implies intent rather than function (because the latter could also be simply expressed as "organisms create entropy").

POSIWID is usually the end result of asking some basic questions about "A System":

  -Has the System taken (on) a mind of its own?

  -What does It want?

  -How do we know what It wants?

For organisms, sometimes just asking it directly can give more useful answers (or surprises,YMMV)

Not necessarily. Cybernetics was specifically the study of systems, so that part can also be taken as an appeal to the experts in the matter.

Generally the point of this observation is specifically about human systems, either designed or evolved. The observation stems from the fact that it's (a) impossible to ascertain what the true intention of a human that designed a system was (they may be publicly lying about it, or even privately, it even to themselves), and (b) any complex enough system has been influenced and possibly "warped" by many more than one human, so the original unique intention, whatever it was, isn't the sole guiding principle behind it.

So, if analyzing a system, rather than trying to dig into its creators' history or anything like that, it's best to just look at what the system is doing and consider that its true current purpose.

Stop it. My eyes can only roll so much.

Agreed about purpose being a loaded term.

It's my, somewhat lazy, philosophical opinion, that there isn't any purpose and there doesn't need to be one.

I don't see why the universe would need a purpose for anything. Things are what they. Things changing state. Entropy.

I see reproduction as more of built in motivation to our system than a purpose as such. But that's semantics, and my purpose in life is not to argue about words! ;-)

Could be. Could also be that reproduction and propagation is the inevitable side effect of that, no? We cant dissipate energy when we're dead.

Rather a way to accomplish that. Life reproducing in order to accelerate the generation of entropy, in other words.

Pretty sure this is what Schrodingers opinion is in his book “what is life?” But I haven’t read it. Maybe OP got it from that

Reproduction is not really a purpose. What makes copies of itself, happens to persist.

It tracks, though "attaining a higher state of entropy" is just what Universes generally do it seems, given our n of 1 Universes we've started to evaluate.

Though, I'm not sure if life is the best at it, when compared to say a black hole. Some smart apes burning off fossil fuels seems pretty insignificant in comparison -- or even seeing what our own Sun does in a few seconds.

File that under, "The Earth will be fine in the long run, it's humans that are f'd" George Carlin pov. Maybe when we start building Death Stars (plural)

I read somewhere that life is more efficient at dissipating energy and faster at increasing entropy than non-living physical/chemical phenomena. Citation needed.

https://www.amazon.nl/Every-Life-Fire-Thermodynamics-Explain...

Right, it's less about the purpose of life (which implies a directive force) and more that a characteristic of life is it's an emergent complexity that finds more efficient ways of increasing entropy.

It gets a bit blurry when you start to substitute "life" for any "complex cosmological system" though...

I think it was from Sean Caroll's book The Big Picture.

The statement is a category error, but that criticism distracts from the very valuable insight he does provide regarding entropy, life and complexity.

He did a series on minutephysics explaining it quite well, worth a watch. He does explain why complexity increases as entropy increases (with some additional qualification).

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLoaVOjvkzQtyZF-2VpJrx...

I have lost the book, but I think I read this in "What is Life? And Other Scientific Essays" by Erwin Schrödinger. If I recall, it was one of the "Other Scientific Essays."

POSIWID. Life on earth's primary "purpose" if observed from space would be to dissipate low-entropy solar radiation, using it to build temporary structures out of carbon.

It is puzzling why life isn't more common. Perhaps dissipative self-organizing structures are everywhere - stars, solar systems and galaxies themselves maintain their order by dissipating energy. They just don't look like "life" to us.

We are only relatively recently have good enough tooling to even talk about discovering bio- and technosignatures in the atmosphere of exoplanets. I'm really hoping that we will find some undeniable evidence in my lifetime.

Surely you mean accelerate entropy.

I presume the end-state of entropy would be the same (excluding ways to escape the universe).

I mean purpose is assigning too much agency, but it's relatively easy to show cells are entropy pumps - they survive by producing a lot more entropy in their environment then is recovered from dying.

The law of increasing complexity holds at least for the software that I write, so yeah—plausible...

Software complexity can decrease though. Very, very unlikely, but there is the possibility of the 12 year old kid from the internet that does a better job than you despite your hard work and long professinal career.

I'm absolutely positive that software complexity can decrease and in so far my post was not entirely serious. I have multiple instances at my hand where re-writing existing libraries with a better focus on simplicity, patterns better suited for the job, more stringent APIs and so on all contribute to produce new versions of software that are ~about as capable as the old version but internally much simpler. However I feel that when I just go on building on and on without tearing down entire edifices of code once in a while, software tends to become inscrutable, hard to maintain and hard to extend.

This seems to be in a similar vein to constructor theory / assembly theory:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructor_theory

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assembly_theory

The thing that is often missed in debates about entropy and Universe is that the classical notion on entropy is not compatible with General Relativity. Richard Tolman almost 100 years ago proposed an extension that was compatible.

One of the consequences of that extension was a possibility of a cyclic universe. On expansion one sees that classically defined entropy increases but then it will decrease on contraction.

These days that work is pretty much forgotten, but still it showed that with GR heat dearth of the universe was not the only option.

There is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conformal_cyclic_cosmology

If I had to bet money on it, I would say it's right, especially in light of things like this: https://phys.org/news/2025-03-ai-image-recognition-universe....

Heat death was never the only option in GR. The field equations always allowed for a big crunch or a big rip.

Yes, but that implies that in GR entropy or at least the value based on the classical definition can decrease.

So apparent increase in complexity can be attributed to gravity.

Sean Carroll today's go-to person for GR has been working at popularizing these ideas (for more than 10 years(!))

https://arxiv.org/abs/1405.6903

>For example, our universe lacked complex structures at the Big Bang and will also lack them after black holes evaporate and particles are dispersed.

See my comment below for link to Scott's preview.

Isn't that like saying that "some things take time"? Complexity also takes time to develop through a myriad probabilities. We even define complexity along the concept of things taking time or equivalent space/memory. As the authors say, functional information of physical systems is very difficult to quantify. Until then, this is another formulation of the anthropic principle , but with complexity instead of humanity.

Pretty cool. I often wondered if the universe was evolving similar to natural selection via a reinforcement learning process. Wave function collapses to the value that maximizes some objective function.

How would you test for it though? I've seen enough residual data from RL processes to almost see semblences of patterns that could be extracted and re-applied at a macro scale.

Likely could be due to laws of math in this universe where more is always desired more then less.

This theory is absurd. They're unjustifiably generalizing from a single system--biological evolution on Earth[1]. There are literally no other places in our solar system even that are rapidly evolving to more complexity. Lots of dead rocks, hot and cold, and a bunch of boiling gas balls. Incidentally, none of these are turning into Cybertron. As it turns out, the chemistry that we know to be necessary for self-replicating things just doesn't work there. (Maybe there are other chemistries that will work, we don't know). So this specific chemistry and this specific set of conditions to kick off and indeed allow self-replication to continue are pretty damn important to understanding how it works.

A "new force of nature"? It's just so pretentious. Some interesting biases of a selection process driven by copious excess energy doesn't make for a new force of nature. Otherwise we'd be positing all kinds of absurdities that are not directly explained by particle physics are woo woo a new force of nature--fashion choices (hey, copy, select, mutate there too).

[1] And no, I don't think that the computer simulations of evolution they carry out are any additional evidence. So you made a computer program with a copy/select/mutate loop in it. Big deal. I can make a computer simulation about anything.

so at heat death of the universe, things will be more complex? i think not. There is clearly a limit to complexity, where that is when that is we don't know.

How does one measure complexity 'in the universe'?

Isn't that exactly what entropy is?

It is following the Fundamental theorem of software engineering, another level of indirection.

"In this new view, biological evolution appears not as a unique process that gave rise to a qualitatively distinct form of matter — living organisms. Instead, evolution is a special (and perhaps inevitable) case of a more general principle that governs the universe. According to this principle, entities are selected because they are richer in a kind of information that enables them to perform some kind of function."

Sounds like they're struggling to accept that the cosmos is not conscious and it doesn't design, and possibly confuse the fantasies we construct to, as it might be phenomenologically put, make sense of our environment, with the environment itself.

In ancient abrahamic cosmology it was proposed that the cosmos was designed, and first it was stone and water and so on, and then the biological matter was put in there, segmenting stone, hippopotamus and human into a kind of cosmological hierarchy of ethical and divine importance. Famous ancient greek philosophers imagined that there was another world shaping ours, geometrically purer and to people with a particular taste perceived as obviously more beautiful and holy.

Different strains of similar thinking survived in parts of the world for a long time, and had a renaissance due to european colonialism spreading it with a diverse set of tools.

One of the strongest views that followed is a cosmological dualism, the belief that there is something like soul or mind that is different from matter, usually paired with the belief that this is how truth enters the world and that truth is otherworldly, etherical.

Modern physics turned out to be absolutely brutal towards ideas like these. For a hundred years experiment upon experiment just smashed such segmentations and expectations against a growing mountain of experiential evidence. As of yet we have no evidence of the cosmos being governed by laws and selection, it just is what it is and the supposed laws are human interpretations, hopes and fantasies.

Protestant christianity is in an especially bad place due to this development, since it bets all it has on mental phenomena being more real than matter. Catholics and muslims can fall back on arguing that the divine is unknowable and that the effects of certain acts and traditions are socially beneficial, which sometimes puts them at odds with or makes them absolutely incompatible with worldly regimes of power. Protestant ideology on the other hand, can be fitted in with basically any regime, material conditions just aren't that important, ethically or otherwise.

Looking at the micro-perspectives we didn't find geometrical simplicity, instead we found weird, messy fields and almost-existences, putting all sorts of expectations about the foundations of the cosmos into question. Maybe it'll change, but at the moment there's no evidence for some grand principle or cosmic selector or whatever. One might argue something here about cosmic constants or the symmetry Dirac sussed out but that's still just pushing human experience into an algebra.

The expectation that life is somehow special is wrong. There is, as far as we can see, no difference in the quarks in a dog and those in a rock. The argument that 'DNA encodes more information' is childish, there are repetitive structures everywhere, like in the crystalline structures in a piece of rock. Protein sacks carrying their own emulation of a particular old ocean on a particular planet and flubbing around on land, carefully putting in salts and carbon and so on to keep it going, is neither more or less complex, neither more or less "information dense" in itself, than a photovoltaic panel pushing electrons to light up a screen.

There is a good book from the nineties on this topic, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilya_Prigogine#The_End_of_Cert.... One should be very suspicious of people that talk about being cosmically selected, or about natural laws.

The authors here are claiming, as your quote states, that biological evolution is just one instance of a more general phenomenon. I'm not sure that's contrary to the views you're expressing. You wrote:

> The expectation that life is somehow special is wrong. There is, as far as we can see, no difference in the quarks in a dog and those in a rock

But the authors' examples do include the "speciation" of minerals! As I read it, the authors describe:

- some initial set of physical states (organisms, minerals, whatever)

- these states create conditions for new states to emerge, which in turn open up new possibilities or "phase spaces", and so on

- these new phase spaces produce new ad hoc "functions", which are (inevitably, with time and the flow of energy) searched and acted upon by selective processes, driving this increase of "functional information".

I don't think it's saying that living things are more complex or information dense per se, but rather, that this cycle of search, selection, and bootstrapping of new functions is a law-like generality that can be observed outside of living systems.

I'm not endorsing this view! There do seem to be clear problems with it as a testable scientific hypothesis. But to my naive ear, all of this seems to play rather nicely with this fundamentally statistical (vs deterministic) picture of reality that Prigogine described, with the "arrow of time" manifesting not just in thermodynamics and these irreversible processes, but also in this diversification of functions.

99.9999999...% of 'everything' in the universe simply falls down a gravity gradient to be crushed into simple oblivion.

Isn’t that actually also in favor of building up more complexity?

Bookworms are such a curious people, I love reading their pop-evo-psych-theory-of-everything articles and counting up all the occult references and hidden meanings. Waiting for a deep yellow sunset with royal blue skies to appear some day where they spill all the beans!

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