Why Everything in the Universe Turns More Complex

Posted by konradx 4/14/2025

Why Everything in the Universe Turns More Complex(www.quantamagazine.org)

149 points | 98 commentspage 2

Gualdrapo 4/14/2025|

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.

kmoser 4/14/2025||

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.

__MatrixMan__ 4/14/2025|||

"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.

prabhu-yu 4/14/2025|||

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?

__MatrixMan__ 4/15/2025||

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.

justanotherjoe 4/14/2025||||

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.

__MatrixMan__ 4/14/2025||

> 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.

justanotherjoe 4/14/2025||

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.

__MatrixMan__ 4/14/2025||

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.

gsf_emergency_2 4/14/2025||||

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...

__MatrixMan__ 4/14/2025||

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.

hnbad 4/14/2025|||

> 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").

gsf_emergency_2 4/14/2025||

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)

tsimionescu 4/14/2025|||

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.

ImHereToVote 4/14/2025|||

Stop it. My eyes can only roll so much.

firecall 4/14/2025||||

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! ;-)

justanotherjoe 4/14/2025||||

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.

guerrilla 4/14/2025||

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

kouru225 4/14/2025||||

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

mjan22640 4/14/2025|||

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

justinator 4/14/2025|||

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)

nayuki 4/14/2025|||

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

MeteorMarc 4/14/2025|||

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

floatrock 4/14/2025|||

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...

flanked-evergl 4/14/2025|||

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...

__MatrixMan__ 4/14/2025|||

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."

perrygeo 4/14/2025|||

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.

tiborsaas 4/14/2025|||

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.

robocat 4/14/2025|||

Surely you mean accelerate entropy.

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

XorNot 4/14/2025||

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.

DemocracyFTW2 4/14/2025||

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

raxxorraxor 4/14/2025|

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.

DemocracyFTW2 4/14/2025||

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.

grumple 4/14/2025||

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

fpoling 4/14/2025||

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.

flanked-evergl 4/14/2025||

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....

mr_mitm 4/14/2025||

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

fpoling 4/14/2025||

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.

gsf_emergency_2 4/14/2025||

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.

seydor 4/14/2025||

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.

afpx 4/14/2025||

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.

m3kw9 4/14/2025||

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

titzer 4/14/2025||

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.

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