A theory of effort as meaning

Normative implications of a chaotic universe

NOTE: For an analytical, succinct exposition of this argument, please see below

A normative theory of everything

To try make sense of life and our place in the universe we need to come up with a theory of that is both descriptive and prescriptive, i.e.:

1. a fairly accurate description of what the universe is and who I am; and
2. an effective guidance for action in the world.

The perspective I’m working with is therefore a pragmatist one: we strive for a theory that is both true and useful, and out of infinite potentially true narratives, we will try to select for the most useful one in guiding our actions.

A good starting point is to look for a unifying pattern in the universe which can explain how things work to the best of our current scientific knowledge. This pattern needs to be simple enough to be clearly understood in plain English, in order for it to provide a possible framework for real-world action. Such theories could be:

• Quantum theory and its interpretations
• Relativity theory
• The Standard Model of physics
• Theory of evolution
• Game theory
• Complexity theory
• etc.

What I find to be the best starting point for a true and useful theory of the universe and our role within it, however, is thermodynamics, specifically its second law. According to one formulation (Wikipedia), this goes as follows:

Total entropy of an isolated system can never decrease over time.

To simplify the concept of entropy, we can take it to mean the number of possible states of particles within a system. A system with low entropy will be structured, ordered, retaining energy; a system with high entropy will be chaotic, its particles dispersed and their energy dissipated. The second law of thermodynamics tells us that, in a sense, time has a clear direction, in that entropy can only increase within a closed system: the system will inexorably become more chaotic, and the orderly patterns will become increasingly less likely.

Taking the universe as one closed system, we therefore go from a highly-ordered, high-potential status before the big bang, when all matter was concentrated in one dot, to the eventual “thermic death” of the universe, in which the stars will grow progressively far from each other and eventually become cold, inert bodies floating into an immense, sparse, still universe.

By extension, this applies not only to energy/matter, but also to information. A fact that is deterministically certain will have zero entropy (and zero information); a fact carrying a lot of information will have high entropy. Therefore, decreasing informational entropy within a system means to get to know it as closely and surely as possible.

To draw a parallel with a celebrated philosophical systems of the past, Aristotle would say that a low-entropy system is potential, progressing toward a high entropy, actualized reality in which all possibilities but the present one have been exhausted.

Entropy and work

It is therefore established that the increase in entropy is a constant pattern within our universe, with chaos increasing over time. This is a basic and indisputable fact about the world. But how should this affect our way of thinking about our place in the universe? Steven Pinker in this short essay gives us a hint:

“[…] Order could be characterized in terms of the set of all microscopically distinct states of a system: Of all these states, the ones that we find useful make up a tiny sliver of the possibilities, while the disorderly or useless states make up the vast majority. It follows that any perturbation of the system, whether it is a random jiggling of its parts or a whack from the outside, will, by the laws of probability, nudge the system toward disorder or uselessness.” […]

“Why the awe for the Second Law? The Second Law defines the ultimate purpose of life, mind, and human striving: to deploy energy and information to fight back the tide of entropy and carve out refuges of beneficial order. An underappreciation of the inherent tendency toward disorder, and a failure to appreciate the precious niches of order we carve out, are a major source of human folly.”

(Read the whole thing here https://www.fs.blog/2017/03/scientific-concepts-know/)

Unpacked, Pinker’s argument therefore goes as follows:

• Increased entropy within a system implies a decrease in the number of useful states within a system, which become less and less likely
• Humans should pursue useful states of energy that are beneficial to them
• Therefore, the expense of human energy in order to fight back entropy is the purpose of human life.

Graph grossly misadapted from David Layzer

“Fighting back the tide of entropy”: this expression evokes a sisyphean effort against the forces of nature that may sound appealing to some and blasphemous to others. But what does fighting against entropy really mean? In order to unpack this, we need to clarify the relationship between entropy and life in all of its manifestations.

Entropy and life

The relationship between entropy and life has been the subject of a long and thorny debate among scientists. In short, life, by creating complex structures through evolution, seems decreases the level of entropy over time, thus apparently contradicting the Second Law. On the other hand, a simple explanation would be that the Earth is not a closed system: we take energy from the sun, which is indirectly transformed into organic matter via photosynthesis, which enables plants to grow and animals to feed on plants, and so on (for a more exhaustive explanation, see here).

Still, it’s hard to explain how could a human brain, composed of 100 billion neurons working seamlessly together, evolve from simple bacteria without a decrease in entropy within the system; and how could bacteria emerge in the first place, as opposed to no life appearing at all and inert matter progressively going colder on the face of the planet until the eventual death of the Sun? It seems logical that life, with all of its different manifestations, is at the very least a “structure”, a pattern that emerges at some point within the inexorable flow of entropy. At best, we can consider life a true instance of “resistance” against entropy (or Negentropy, as it has been called by some).

In probabilistic terms, we can say that circumstances that 4 billion years ago gave rise to life were extremely unlikely. Of course, with billions upon billions of solar systems, there was always a chance that carbon compounds and a few metals would bound together in a wet and heated environment to create life. But we still have to think that it’s at the very least a rare occurrence.

Importantly, a similar reasoning can be applied to the higher manifestations of life: consciousness and reason.

The emergence of consciousness was even more unlikely than that of life. Science can’t tell us yet what consciousness is, but we know that it “feels like something” being us. And this something compels us to act and do things that are more than mere survival and the spreading of our genes.

Finally, reason, which is arguably what sets humans apart from the rest of the known creation, that skill that enables millions of people who have never met each other to work together toward common goals and build cathedrals and put a man on the moon — reason was an unlikely twist of evolution of an unlikely conscious creature which sprung out of an unlikely combination of molecules that came alive around four billion years ago.

The core argument here is that the preservation of this unlikely state is something worth fighting for. More than that: it’s all that matters. And it’s done through human effort.

Effort

By human effort we mean the activities by which humans give structure and order to the world, beyond their simple metabolic functions. Effort is what enables us to domesticate cattle and cultivate wheat, to dig ore form the earth’s abyss, to construct skyscrapers, to compose operas and to write articles. The result of all of these exemplary actions is a world with slightly lower entropy that a world in which such actions had not occurred.

The expenditure of human effort decreases the entropy level within the system. To explain how, let’s take again the solar system as an approximation of a closed system:

1. The sun irradiates earth with thermic energy, feeding the plants via photosynthesis
2. The plants in turn feed the animals, including humans. Thermic energy is transformed into chemical energy
3. Humans expend such energy to create structure where there was none. The chemical energy in the body is dispersed and expended just as it would be if humans were merely fulfilling their biological functions (through body heat, excretion and ultimately the decomposition of our bodies). However, as opposed to a human that goes through life with no other pursuit than eating, drinking and sleeping, a human that before dying leaves behind a neatly plowed field or an exquisite painting has pulled back entropy to some extent. It has created a structure in matter (in the case of the field) or in information (in the case of the painting), where no structure was previously in place.

Crucially, the point of effort is not really the results achieved: it is effort itself. It is not so important whether, in a lifetime of efforts, an individual is able to to compose nine symphonies, start a company or just plant one single tree. What matters is that chemical energy that would have otherwise gone to waste, transformed into useless thermic energy dispersed into the environment, is instead being “upcycled” into a usable form though human effort.

In some cases this process happens more efficiently, in some cases less. But the truth is that any non-metabolic human effort is making a contribution to the fight against entropy.

This is a paradigm shift in how we think about effort. Effort is not what is standing between us and our goal: effort, or the upcycling of chemical energy into something useful for humans, is the goal.

In this sense, emperor Marcus Aurelius’ statement from 1800 years ago is true in a way that he could never have guessed: “The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way”.

So here is something to keep in mind. Some of us craft useful tools out of sterile matter. Some of make the land bloom with the nutrition we need. Some care for the young, the weak and the elderly, and those that in nature would be left to their fate. Some create the art and the beauty that gives our life its flavor and joy. And some of us try to solve hard problems, enabling people to live prosperously and carrying our species forward. We are all ultimately a part of the same struggle: the struggle against Nature, entropy and chance.

We have therefore established that human effort is per se worthy of pursuit. But how should such effort be best directed?

Directions for effort

Based on what we said so far, we should conclude that we should dedicate most of our effort to any activity that will decrease entropy the most. To define what these activities are, we propose a hierarchy of structures (structures — as previously defined- are orderly patterns that emerge within the inexorable flow of entropy):

1. A world with life has lower entropy than a world with no life;
2. a world where complex creatures have evolved has lower entropy than a world where only simple creatures exist;
3. A world where consciousness and reason have appeared has lower entropy than a world where populated by unconscious, non intelligent creatures.
4. a world shaped and ordered by humans to fit their needs has lower entropy than a world left to its natural state
5. a complex and organized society has lower entropy than a Hobbesian “state of nature”

Each level of the hierarchy has more order and lower entropy than the previous one, and in choosing how to direct our efforts we should take into account the relative amount of resistance to entropy (Negentropy) compared to each other. For example: taken on its own, evolution is clearly a form of “resistance” against entropy, in that it orders the biosphere by the creation of ecosystems with progressively more complex creatures. Compared to a world shaped by humans, however, a world of complex but illiterate, non creative creatures represents chaos. How much information that is being generated, ordered and used by humans on a daily basis would remain in its natural, chaotic and useless state had we not invented alphabets and numeric systems, the printing press, the internet, etc.? How many useful skyscrapers would have remained unmined iron ore and silicon sand forgotten in the ground?

In light of this, we can mirror our hierarchy of structures with a hierarchy of worthwhile pursuits. Some of the things worth expending effort for are:

1. The preservation of life over its extinction
2. The preservation of complex creatures over that of simple creatures
3. The extension of consciousness (if at all possible) and the cultivation and use of reason
4. The shaping of the world into states that are appealing to humans
5. The creation and preservation of complex societies

As we can see, the point of effort is almost always the “humanization”, the taming of nature. Nature is to be seen in opposition to reason and human activity. Nature is, in its wildest form, entropy itself; in its more tame version that happened to manifest itself on Earth, it is life and the evolutionary process. But even evolution and the concept of natural selection stand in opposition to the more ordered structures that humans can bring about: a world in which the sick and the disabled are left to die has higher entropy than one in which they are taken care of, for example.

The idea that the humanization of nature is the point of all effort is echoed in the biblical saying:

And God said to them, Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth. (Genesis, 1.28)

In a way, we are also coming back again to Aristotle. His classical argument from the Nicomachean Ethics is that the human good must be identified with acting according to what is unique to human nature, namely reason: therefore to fulfill its purpose, man must act rationally, as opposed to how other animals act (instinctually). Here too, we have to consider rationally-directed effort as the primary form of effort, since that reason is the tool that more than any other can help humans create order out of chaos.

Based on what we have seen, some of the most useful objects of human pursuit could be:

• Exploration (eg. Magellan, SpaceX): Reducing informational entropy by gathering and classifying geographic information
• Encyclopedic systematization of knowledge (eg. Diderot’s Encyclopedie, Google): reducing informational entropy by gathering and classifying all types of information
• Global governance (eg. the UN): creating organizational structures
• Art: using high-entropy raw materials to create information in the form of meaningful representations
• Care: a true rebellion against evolution, caring for the sick and the elderly decreases the extent to which we follow the relatively high-entropy path of evolution

These of course are just examples. As we have seen before, any non-metabolic human activity makes a contribution, large or small, to the fight against entropy.

Conclusion

There may be no point or meaning to human existence. However, if a meaning is to be sought for, short of theological explanations, it is to be found in the human struggle against entropy in the form of effort to be expended in non-metabolic activities, particularly in humanizing, taming nature.

Analytical exposition

Statement 1. Entropy is bad

1. The inevitable increase in entropy is a fact of the universe
2. We can associate high entropy within a system, or chaos, with a negative state for humans; lower entropy with a positive state.
3. Therefore, lower entropy states (aka Negentropy) are something to be pursued by humans

Statement 2. Effort is good

1. Lower entropy states are something to be pursued by humans
2. Humans can decrease entropy by exerting effort, i.e. expending their own energy (ultimately derived from the Sun) to shape nature around them. Humans leave entropy unchanged by going though life by merely exercising their biological functions.
3. Therefore, the exertion of effort is to be pursued by humans. This is preferable over a mere exertion of biological functions.

Statement 3. Directions for effort

1. Lower entropy states are something to be pursued by humans
2. The exertion of effort is to be pursued by humans
3. It is the case that:

3.1. A world with life has lower entropy than a world with no life;

3.2. a world where complex creatures have evolved has lower entropy than a world where only simple creatures exist;

3.3. a world where a world shaped and ordered by humans to fit their needs has lower entropy than a world left to its natural state;

3.4. a complex and organized society has lower entropy than a Hobbesian “state of nature”

4. Therefore, the exertion of effort should be directed toward:

4.1. the preservation of life over its extinction,

4.2 the preservation of complex creatures over that of simple creatures,

4.3. the shaping of the world into states that are appealing to humans,

4.4. the creation and preservation of complex societies

Statement 4. the future

1. The inevitable increase in entropy is a fact of the universe
2. Lower entropy states are something to be pursued by humans
3. The lowest imaginable entropic state that can be produced by humans tends towards uniformity: one language, one government, one society, etc.
4. Monolithic and uniform entities are less resilient than diversified, heterogenous entities
5. Therefore, humans should strive to maintain the balance between reduced entropy, i.e. giving structure to the world, and leaving free rein to entropy, thus allowing for diversification and increased resilience