Negative Entropy
Resisting Entropy as a Virtuous Pursuit
Part 1:
Modernity has placed humans into a paradox. It has pitted life against a tidal wave of comforts. As the Cotonelle waves crash around us, they leave us to wade through a life rife with convenience, ease, and one devoid of legitimate physical stress. At first glance, the comforts are ideal with the pre-modernity view of life as it was one of survival and destitute. Despite innumerable eases and safety measures, the rub, however, is growth and comfort cannot exist in the same place.
In 1943, Erwin Schrodinger gave a series of lectures titled What is Life, which also spawned a book under the same title. It is a momentous examination of what makes life unique. Schrodinger lays the groundwork by welding insights from physics, chemistry, genetics, and biology into an overarching thread that examines the nature of life and its relationship to the universe. Schrodinger points out that all life feeds on negative entropy.
Life, unlike anything else in our universe, is a highly organized system that fights to maintain organization as time goes on. The body arranges its constituent cells into types, tissues, organs, and systems. The body also organizes the materials it ingests into specific patterns to match the environmental prediction. Examples include increased signals to offload oxygen to muscle tissues during exercise or proteins broken down into amino acids and rebuilt for a needed tissue, hormone, or other structure to maintain or improve bodily functions.
Entropy is simply the inevitability of everything in the physical universe to move towards disorder. Ultimately, everything moves toward a point of maximum entropy. On a long enough timeline, the universe will cease to expand. Life, however, is the antithesis of entropy. Life is the pocket that resists entropy. If the fabric of your being resists entropy, conceivably, it is virtuous, to consciously resist entropy as well.
Maximum entropy is the state in which matter can no longer carry out any further action. It is the ultimate resting place. The hot coffee placed out on the table, given enough time, will eventually reach a point in which there is no more thermodynamic energy. The coffee is always cooling, never spontaneously warming. But life can do just this by feeding on higher energy states. You extract resources from your environment to maintain and construct a highly organized state.
Entropy will occur despite our inclination to hold on to the now. It is the slow-moving river. You can grab a life raft and float down the river, sipping wine with your eyes closed. Or you can get out and swim. It is going to be much more difficult to manage, but you will have the agency to swim to the shore, grab onto a branch, wave to the people passing by. You can swim upstream from time to time. Accepting entropy in its unrestrained faculties is the surrender of your soul. Accepting entropy is to live in nihilism.
Consider entropy as more than just the formal definition of physical decay and disorder. Entropy extends beyond our world of bits and atoms. The concept of entropy permeates into the human experience. Entropy is the tendency for complacency. Entropy is the inclination for humans to become apathetic when faced with menial tasks or burdens. Entropy is the movement from curiosity into indifference. It is a rejection of experience and an acceptance of banality. Entropy is the pill to wash away your symptoms before working to acquire a cure. Entropy is unadulterated consumption. To let Entropy move forth unbridled is to live a life of ease.
The act to resist entropy (verb), is the wedge between space, time, and a marked conclusion. The conclusion can be any arbitrary point in time because ultimately everything is an extension of some other process. The processes of life and the universe is infinitely moving. We as humans can select and refine what conclusions we wish to focus on. Whether I decide to walk across the room, climb a mountain, twist my fork, stave off disease, write a book, speak to a friend, or to arrive at “something;” I am actualizing myself between space and time. This is the act of resisting entropy.
The wedge gives you enough space to act upon life. You happen to life when you resist entropy. Modern man may argue this away and deem life currently as fate or will or God. But resisting entropy is announcing that you are meant for something more in the face of destiny. To resist entropy bores no means to an end because for it is just the means. It is the behaviors. It is to be. When man has space to become what he truly is, he is self-actualized.
If death is the known conclusion of life as we know it, some people are dead long before their death certificate is signed and dated. You know the person I am speaking on. They signal the metaphorical death to the universe before the final act occurs. These men have accepted the status quo without any look into the nature of their potential. This man forms a hollow look in his eyes. He has played his cards and is waiting for the flop. Life is nothing but a narrow path to a conclusion. He is waiting at Death’s bus stop. And once the bus arrives, it will fulfil him. He is buried in his phone, waiting to reply to the next email or text message. He eats Chinese takeout with little reverence for how it came before him. He swallows an anti-depressant, chasing it down with diet soda with no philosophical examination as to why. He has nothing more to give. His life is a soulless effort. Life just happens to him.
To allow conscious entropy to move forward unchecked is to live in passivity or comfort. It is to submit to the consolations of your world. Shopping, binging on television shows, watching sports for hours on end, and alcohol consumption are all escapes from facing uncomfortable truths about yourself. In some sense, facing these truths and strengthening yourself is a turn away from free range decay. To avoid the harsh truth of your inner shortcomings, you distract yourself with comforts as an escape from potential and of course, action. In turn, you become a slave to that which you rely on.
The Disney film Wall-E paints a trajectory of human dystopia that we seem to be on. In it, humans now ride around on floating chairs with all their needs on the screen in front of them. They live in world where entertainment, consumption, and gluttony are of utmost importance. They no longer carry out conversations face to face and instead opt to utilize a FaceTime-like method even when the person is adjacent to them. The touch of a screen meets every need. Liquid calories (the worst kind of calories, mind you) rocket to their hovering chairs. The humans float around in a world with incessant influences on what to buy, wear, or do. These humans live life on a perpetual cruise ship vacation. The characters are aims to be manipulated by a consumptive culture. The humans essentially lack the autonomy to partake in anything meaningful and this is the reflective crux we face today.
Life for the modern man provides no wide-ranging physical challenges day to day. He no longer spends great lengths of time outdoors, fighting the elements. High caloric food is at our beck and call with the touch of an app. And if that fails, a surplus of calories awaits at the corner store. Traveling longer distances no longer requires any surmountable hardship beyond the walk from your house to your car. Consider the electric car of today has even eliminated the hand and finger flexion required to begin pumping your gas. Even most commuters to work are spending large portions of time in a sedentary position only to walk into work in a covered garage followed by an elevator ride up to their climate-controlled office. As remote work increases for much of the population, we have cut the commute down to a walk from the bedroom to the office, give or take a stop in the kitchen for a cup of coffee.
The lowest hanging fruit for strengthening your being is through physical pursuits as they are inextricably one with the mind. Physical actions, particularly ones that push the boundaries of your experience, are more likely to widen the breadth of your physical resilience, but mental as well. As the body adapts to physical actions it creates a symbiotic relationship with the mind in which the brain and body act in accordance with each other. The body self regulates itself to match the predictions of the brain. If the brain has seen these bodily functions in regularity and has actualized itself to take on these “insults,” it finds no problem reacting harmoniously to fewer or less volatile conditions. The nervous system becomes a well-balanced arch, not moving too far one direction or the other.
A conceivably even more insidious contradiction to our nature exists beyond our physical world. The internet and (potential) metaverse have shown to be a dubious endeavor if considering the holistic health of the individual as an inherent value. Highly dopaminergic geared systems have provided the human with a bottomless pit of reward. The symbolic slot machine pulls over and over, consequently raising one’s hedonic threshold. Much like an alcoholic or drug addict, increased doses are required to feel “normal.” The problem barbs because it is not just a mental wellbeing issue. The body sits idle for longer periods to enact the feelings of normalcy. And this idleness is what may be at the core of the issue. We were meant to move, act, and undergo challenge within nature. No accomplishment was ever the product of seeking comfort. Accomplishments, stories, and significance are all forged in fire. Your tombstone will not say here lies [your name here], they were always on a beach sipping Mai Tais.
It has become increasingly esoteric to resist entropy. What was once commonplace, now places you at the end of the distribution. Walking, martial arts, cooking meals with real ingredients, reading books on the fringe of your proximal development, learning from first principals, self-reliance, difficult/real training, etc. are now considered fringe endeavors. The efforts that are difficult can slow the rate of decay and in turn, create growth.
Our time is ultimately finite. Viewing a screen with no challenge or discomfort spawns a unique problem of relativity. The energy of activation is low when spent on screened devices beyond our physical action. Time passes through as an acceleration. Time burns on social media like the kindling to a fire. To start the fire within requires little effort, but the flame wanes without a more substantial fuel source. Now, to keep the system satisfied, more mindless scrolling and swiping ensue to keep the fire burning. Pure consumption through a screen is akin to throwing dry leaves on the fire. Quick to light, quick to burn up. Whereas the novel and experiences of life that are challenging create a relative slowing of time. This is the wedge. Take holding a plank or push up position, for example. The front end of the timing seems to pass with no thought, but as your limits stretch, fatigue sets in, your focus hones into the body and time seems like a standstill compared to the first half of the plank. Physical challenges and worldly experiences are the hardwood with a slow burn.
You may remember time as a slow-moving process when you were a child. A snail’s pace at times. Days filled with unexpected twists and turns. A sea of knowledge to be taken in. Life was always anew. And perhaps time as you aged began to subjectively pass at an inconceivably fast rate. Ever accelerated with each passing year. As your adult neurological filter became more refined, it started to dismiss everything it deemed unimportant. The neurological highways constructed with very little off ramps to build. Life now becomes a series of routines driving up and down these highways. Your views, opinions, philosophies, skills, physical abilities, language patterns, etc, etc. all have been constructed over these years. And now time passes because the mind has no need to leave the highway.
But to build new pathways is effectively slowing time as well. Take learning a language or writing a book, for example. These are incredibly difficult tasks, particularly later in life. The language may start out as the stamped down grass of your neurological pathway. But with each moment working towards mastery, the path becomes more taken. The grass turns to dirt. Eventually, the dirt becomes a trench. Perhaps mastery ensues and the dirt path becomes paved. With an increase in proficiency, it becomes too slow to walk and you must bike or drive. Now the path is a full-blown road system in your neurocircuitry. It is the process, the building, that is the slowing of time. When you slow time, you are once again metaphorically wedging yourself between space and time and, in-turn, resisting entropy.
The modern man or woman with all the collective knowledge at your fingertips lacks curiosity. Simply wanting answers to questions is not the foundation of curiosity. Curiosity is a venture into the dark. It is the search for unknowns. It is an attempt to quench a thirst for understanding. As you enter the forest of ignorance for the first time, it is finding paths and light created by others who explored these woods before you. The google or chat AI search is the bungee jump into the forest only to be propelled back out after obtaining your answer. To be genuinely curious, you will have to acknowledge the discomfort of not knowing which direction to head in next. The darkness pervades the forest. And as you begin to come across the bark of a tree you carved into before, you will mentally create a map of the unknown territory.
A probable solution to our plights in the modern era is an almost injectable resistance to comforts. Exercise is perhaps the clearest example of injectable resistance. Exercise is essentially the induction of stress, repeated, to increase long-term resistance to other stressors. Without listing the innumerable benefits exercise has on maximizing long-term success of an organism, overall, has been shown to decrease global dysfunction of an organism by maximizing efficiency, resilience, and organization of top-down functions. Disfunction and cellular disorganization ultimately are what lead to disease states. And although exercise is an integral part of resisting entropy, it cannot be the only tool utilized.
In essence, injectable hardship is to create a potential between your thoughts and actions. Our neurobiology is wired to take the path of least resistance. The path of least resistance is the road most traveled. It is a clean and refined road. It may even be pragmatic for most, but it narrows your experience down to a minimal number of pre-set expectations. If you never take the stairs, how do you think your body is going to react if it forced you to take the stairs? These “presets” of experience limit one’s ability to confront nature’s randomness. You can’t solely rely on society to prop up your limitations. You, as an individual, are responsible for the breadth of your experience.
Ultimately, we are all headed for sickness, disease, and death. Some will carry the burden longer than others and it is not beyond me to realize that you cannot indefinitely “resist entropy.” Dying is the last call for our understanding of conscious life. The aim of resisting entropy is not to negate the idea of death, but to arrive at it with having lived a heightened plane of existence. The art of dying is a likely another virtuous endeavor, one forgotten by many cultures in the West. And although this is a topic I would like to explore, it is beyond this essay.
The trans-humanism movement will argue that we are on the brink of a biological and/or technological revolution that will enable humans to live far beyond the current boundaries of what we understand life to be. This may be the direction we are headed as a species, but it denies the human as one emergent entity. To be truly alive, you must actively be involved in struggle, hardship, and challenge. Elimination of all need for struggle is only inducing a different kind of pain. A pain of apathy follows when human hardship is milked away.
It can be argued that actively resisting entropy is a form of asceticism. From this vein of thought, we could also posit that resisting entropy in its purest form detracts from the pleasantries of life. Most people in this camp are of the thinking that asceticism is a form of self-mutilation or a way to enslave yourself to the harshness of life. Resisting entropy acknowledges the need for some self-control in a world of unlimited pleasure but does not endorse a life of misery and suffering to obtain its full potential.
Resisting entropy is not about an asceticism of deprivation. It is quite the opposite. Resisting entropy is living fully and embracing the expansion and margins of your experience. It is an effort to lean into yourself as a self-realized entity. To resist entropy is to find growth in challenge and hardship. Throughout the universe, there are pockets of life that actively feed on negative entropy. We live in one of those isolated pockets. The Nietzschean concept of eternal recurrence suggests that perhaps it is in our best interest to fight for order and meaning in an otherwise absurd and chaotic universe. Announce to the universe you intend to truly live, and you will do it over and over into infinitude.