A Meditation on Entropy and Evil
This is a huge subject and I have a lot to say about it. For the moment, I’d like to give you a thumbnail sketch of an idea that seems to have “legs”.
“Entropy” is one of the deepest and most powerful ideas in Science. Unfortunately, along with Quantum Mechanics, it is a total mystery to most educated laymen. At the risk of insulting your intelligence, I will give you a quick introduction to the idea, with the promise that I will connect it to something very relevant and practical by the end of the essay.
For those new to the subject, there are many exhaustive treatments on-line, such as:
Unfortunately, if you don’t already “get” the idea of entropy, such essays will only deepen the mystery. For the moment, lets just say that entropy is a measure of randomness.It’s easier to understand the opposite of entropy, which you might think of as “information”. There is another, closely connected idea of entropy that comes from thermodynamics. Ultimately the two definitions refer to the same thing: one from an information point of view and one from a physical systems point of view. Let’s talk about entropy as the opposite of information ...
Imagine that you have a task of writing down a totally complete and accurate description of human being.
We’d need to start with giving a complete DNA sequence, not just of the human in general, but this particular human. That’s just the start. We’d need to specify the exact state of every neuron in his head and the connectivity of all the trillions of of connections between neurons. We’d also need a high resolution 3D movie of his entire life and possibly the same kind of movie for everyone who has ever shared space with this person, at least for the moments that each person encountered our subject. This would obviously be a vast amount of information, but we can imagine that it’s not quite infinite and that there would be a way, at least in principal, to describe a human being.
Now imagine that our subject dies.
All his DNA will break up to simpler chemicals. The marvellous complexity of his brain will dissolve into goop. We can greatly simplify our task of describing him by “cheating” — noticing that one dead human is pretty much the same as any other dead human. There is still a lot you could say about the corpse, but it’s obvious that there is a lot less to say.
This thought experiment illustrates the idea of entropy. The laws of thermodynamics say that entropy always increases. The world tends to go to mush. Entropy is inversely proportional to the information content of a system. The idea can be made mathematically rigorous, connecting it to Information Science which can also rigorously define what we mean by “information”.
But we can put away our calculators for the moment. I’ll be talking about entropy and information in situations where differences and orders of magnitude are obvious. There will be no need to actually compute entropy, but it is important to understand that entropy is real. For example, a map of temperature in a system is a map of entropy. What’s more, the universe “likes” entropy — Entropy is constantly increasing in the universe and its opposite (information) is constantly being destroyed. Without input of energy, a closed system will increase in entropy.
In fact, the Universe likes entropy so much that life can be seen as a constant struggle against it.
In our thought experiment, we saw that a human being is a huge pile of “negative entropy” and his death results in an equal but opposite increase in entropy. To stay alive we must fight a losing battle against entropy. In the end, as the Bible points out, we all wind up as dust. Dust is pretty simple uncomplicated high entropy stuff.
So we can immediately suspect a connection with ethics. All things being equal, we would think of life itself as a “good” thing. However, the preference of the Universe for entropy absolutely guarantees that every living thing will ultimately be destroyed. We suspect that there is some connection between “evil” and entropy.
I must stress that I am not claiming that entropy and evil are the same thing. However, by asking about entropy in a variety of human situations, we see that the connection runs very deep. This is particularly interesting because we think of morality and the judgment of “evil” as being purely subjective, whereas entropy is hard core physics. Entropy is as real as it gets.
Here are some examples:
- We have already seen that the death of a person is a triumph of entropy. There are few things in life that are sadder or more tragic than the death of a loved one. What we have lost is the infinitely complex experience of that one individual. All his knowledge. The comfort of his physical presence. His skills and abilities. Our own lives become less interesting, we lose options — we lose all those elements of our own lives that involved interacting with the loved one. We are left with dust — an unbearable triumph of entropy. Such losses are made more painful by the fact that we know that they are irreversible. Entropy and the arrow of time conspire — in fact entropy may hold the key to the mysteries of time itself. Left to themselves, things fall apart, decay, dissolve into dust and crud. All the King’s horses and all the King’s men cannot put Humpty Dumpty together again.
- Think of what happened in Hiroshima when the atomic bomb was dropped. The lives of hundreds of thousands if individuals, along with everything they had built, all their plans, skills and knowledge was reduced to a smoking garbage heap. That bomb cannot be un-dropped. Of course, to do so would require that we go back in time, which is mysteriously connected to the the fact that we cannot “swim up stream” against entropy.
- What was that war all about? What the Japanese and Germans had in common was the desire to turn everybody into good Germans or good Japanese or dust. This would have resulted in a great reduction in the complexity of the human experience itself. The war itself was fought in the name of freedom against entropy. To be free is to have the widest possible choice of action and a maximum of information. A free society is a complex society. Tyrants strive to render citizens predictable and interchangeable.
We have not done very well when it comes to grounding ethics on a firm foundation. In spite of thousands of years of discussion, we are left with the uncomfortable feeling that perhaps there is no “right” or “wrong” — only personal preference and cultural habits. Perhaps entropy gives us a way to "objectify" good and evil, at least in some situations.
- Reduction of biodiversity is an increase in entropy. Every death is an increase in entropy, but the death of an entire species is an irreducible one.
- Pollution is basically the project of turning the entire Earth into a swamp of toxic sludge.
Both of these examples would be true even if there were not humans around to comment on them. Yet both of them seem to be intuitively “wrong”. By introducing the concept of entropy into the description, we wind up with a way to introduce physics — totally objective — criteria into our analysis. While it may not always be true, “good” is on the side of complexity; “evil” is on the side of entropy.
Of course, the philosopher reading these words might jump to his feet and point out clever counter-examples, re-definitions and exceptions. In my (admittedly brief) research on philosophical discussion of entropy as evil, I have found that the idea is hardly original with me, nor without its detractors. What is disappointing is that very few philosophers have a working understanding of the physics or hard-core information theory. In many cases, they seem to want to avoid using the term “entropy” because they simply don’t understand it. It’s quite possible to get through a couple of years of College physics without truly grasping the idea of entropy. Very few “professional” philosophers have darkened the door of any physics class. Working with entropy also involves Statistics at a rather advanced level — something that philosophers (and the public at large) regard as a black art. And of course, there is the contempt that philosophers have of mere facts. They are confident that language — talk — can settle all matters of importance.
I am not claiming that entropy=evil. Entropy is like a river we all float in — sometimes called the “river of time”. We cannot escape it. Life itself is a struggle against entropy. The torrent of entropy flows all around is, but we create little pockets of anti-entropy. Stealing a tiny fraction of the to huge amounts of energy flowing uselessly from the Sun into the cold of space, we rise from the mud, reproduce and evolve ever more complex exceptions to the general rule of decay and destruction.
As living beings, our core values are all about anti-entropy. To be alive is to process information, to build up non-random structure, to discover the meaningful (useful) bits of reality in all the mush surrounding us, to impose useful structure and order on the chaos around us. At every turn, our enemy is that universal slide back toward the mud: entropy.
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