Negentropic Beings

The first principles of progress

Risk & Progress explores risk, human progress, and your potential. My mission is to educate, inspire, and invest in concepts that promote a better future for all. Subscriptions are free. Paid subscribers gain access to the full archive and Pathways of Progress.

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Every smartphone, every skyscraper, and every scientific breakthrough is not just a consequence of human ingenuity; it is the universe computing itself at ever-higher speeds. From the Big Bang’s first binary flickers, reality is a vast information processor, turning energy into stable patterns we call “matter,” evolving life, and eventually minds capable of deliberate progress. Each advance we make, from the agricultural revolution to the industrial revolution, to the current intelligence revolution, accelerates the same ancient process: capturing energy, encoding knowledge, dissipating heat, and carving pockets of order from chaos. What we celebrate as “human progress” is just the cosmos upgrading its own software, with us, humans, as its most sophisticated subroutine yet.

Understanding Entropy

We previously explored the possibility that the universe is informational, one where everything derives its existence from binary yes/no questions. Reality, therefore, could be the outcome of countless trillions of interactions, what we might call computations, each erasing past alternatives and recording present outputs. This process isn’t free, however; the cost is entropy. In 1961, Rolf Landauer showed that information is physical; anytime we reset a memory register from 1 to 0, or vice versa, a small amount of heat is released. Therefore, every time the universe “learns” something new, it dissipates a small amount of heat energy. Entropy was described long ago in the laws of thermodynamics. The First Law of Thermodynamics states that energy cannot be created or destroyed. Most school children learn at least this much. The Second Law, however, goes further, stating that in an isolated system, entropy will never decrease. The Second Law of Thermodynamics is, in a sense, the first rule of progress.

Another way to think about entropy is as a measure of “disorder.” Low-entropy (ordered) states are statistically improbable. If you build a sandcastle on the beach and return a few days later, it’s probably long gone; the grains of sand returned to a random arrangement of particles. This is because there are nearly infinite ways of arranging sand grains on a beach, but very few that will build a castle. Similarly, if you dump a box of puzzle peices onto a table, they are almost certain to land in a disordered fashion. There is only one way for the pieces to organise themselves into the final image, but there are nearly infinite ways for them to land in the “wrong” order. Entropy also gives rise to what we perceive as time. Most of the laws of the universe, mathematically described, are symmetric: they work equally well when played backwards or forwards. Yet, in our world, shattered glass doesn’t spontaneously reconnect, mixed gases don’t suddenly dissociate, eggs don’t uncrack, and we cannot “remember” the future. Entropy creates a clear direction, like the current of a river, which we call the “arrow of time.”

I argue that as time passes, the universe “computes” in a forward direction, building stable structures that encode the results of past computations. The simplest form of said structures is what we call “matter.” We usually think of “matter” as that which has “mass,” and we get mass in two ways. First, from the mass of elementary particles that make up atoms, like quarks, when they interact with the “Higgs Field,” a kind of “energy field” that permeates all space. Over 99 percent of an atom’s mass, however, is found in the energy that “glues” subatomic particles together—specifically, the “strong force,” one of the four fundamental forces of the universe created at the Big Bang.

Matter, therefore, is not entirely distinct from energy. We might best think of matter as a measure of intrinsic energy content, or “bound energy.” In fact, Einstein’s famous equation, E=mc², was originally written as M=E/c², illustrating that mass is a measurement of the energy contained within a body. This is why we can produce energy by splitting or fusing atoms, releasing their stored energy. It also means that all energy contributes to mass. For instance, a compressed spring is slightly heavier than an uncompressed spring, and a charged battery is slightly heavier than an uncharged battery; the difference is just too small for us to notice in everyday experience.

Matter can also be thought of as a stable configuration of energy that encodes the results of a prior “computation.” It’s a kind of “memory” that stores a crude form of knowledge, and the more complex the material structures, the more knowledge is contained therein. The story of what we call “human progress” is an amplified and accelerated version of the same process that began with the Big Bang. A process that uses energy, creates knowledge, and encodes that knowledge into matter, dissipating heat in the process. As we will see, this basic process defines the creation of new elements in the stars, elements that would eventually combine into molecules like DNA, encoding the blueprints for life. Eventually, those molecules would discover a means to build a human brain, the first mechanism that could dematerialise knowledge and accelerate its diffusion. Chemical evolution gives way to biological evolution, and then to cultural evolution. Each rung of the ladder acquires knowledge and dissipates energy faster than the one before it.

Life: A Negentropic Force

Wait a moment, you might say. How can life emerge in a universe that tends toward disorder? Isn’t life an example of order? After all, cells are made of complex, highly ordered structures. Trees grow tall and wide, standing up against the inevitability of entropy itself. Life doesn’t violate the Second Law because organisms are not isolated systems, a prerequisite of the law. On the contrary, as we will see, life accelerates entropy by dissipating energy faster than regular chemical processes ever could. In other words, life uses knowledge to carve a slice of order from the disorder. That pocket of order, that low-entropy “bubble,” exports entropy to the surrounding universe. Life is a negentropic force.

This makes humans the ultimate negantropes. Our large brains and capacity to communicate through vocal vibrations allow us to plan, wonder, reason, and, most importantly, to diffuse knowledge. We are, as far as we know anyway, the only arrangement of atoms that is conscious; the only beings capable of discovering and understanding the laws of the universe. Humans have found means of capturing energy on a heretofore unprecedented scale. From first discovering how to harvest sunlight via agriculture, to burning the energy stored in ancient life, or fossil fuels, to splitting the atom itself. We capture energy, discover knowledge, and use that knowledge to create beneficial counter-entropic forms, which we call “technology.” These technologies allow us to do more with less. We learned, for example, how to grow more food with less land, how to build engines that shrink the world, and even how to make sand “think.”

We experience and measure the fruits of these discoveries as “economic growth.” Humans have constructed evolutionary market systems that parallel their biological counterparts, accelerating the search for new counter-entropic forms. This “social supercomputer,” as I call it, ceaselessly processes input data, producing voluminous output data in the search for answers to ever more complex counter-entropic riddles. This eternal struggle against entropy gives humanity a core purpose: a never-ending endeavour to create order from the chaos. Indeed, this is how we are wired. The desire for order is so deeply rooted in our biology that we are naturally attracted to counter-entropic forms, from flowers to architecture.

In this informational universe, knowledge is infinite. The only limitation to how far humans can go is how fast we can accumulate it. Only with continued technological advancement and expanded negentropic capacity can we sustain the light of consciousness. This, in my view, is a moral imperative. One day, an exhausted Sun will expand and boil Earth’s oceans, if not consume the Earth entirely. When this happens, all life on the pale blue dot will end; its counter-entropic beauty will cease to exist. The only hope for life is us. Our species was endowed with a nearly limitless capacity to learn and discover. With this power, the power of knowledge, we have the potential to leave this planet and to take life with us to other star systems. It is often asked, why are we here? As good stewards of life on Earth, we are here to spare it from total annihilation at the hands of that fusion engine in the sky.

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Deafening Silence

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Bits of Being