There is one law that would seem to work against us: the dreaded second law of thermodynamics. It says that entropy (or disorder) always increases over time in an isolated system. And that all physical systems will eventually become completely run down and incapable of physical activity. Yet, the cosmos doesn't seem run down at all and has done a pretty good job countering all that entropy. I mean, we've got sexy galaxies, some cool planets, and even lots of crazy life on this one! So the caveat may be that our cosmos is not an isolated system after all. And if it isn't closed, is there something guiding from behind the scenes to create order?
Sir Fred Hoyle once remarked, “A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with the physics, as well as with the chemistry and biology, and there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature.”
But we don't want shun all questions to the answer of God just yet. That would be rude to our skeptical readers. It seems to me there is still an interesting, rational theory that can explain order in the cosmos.
Kevin Kelly, who leans towards secular explanations, came up with a clever term for this decreasing entropy: exotropy. He says, “The multibillion-year rise of exotropy—as it flings up stable molecules, solar systems, a planetary atmosphere, life, mind, and the technium—can be restated as the slow accumulation of ordered information. Or rather, the slow ordering of accumulated information.”
So information may be where it's at (along with those turtles all the way down). For many years we believed the material universe to be made of matter and energy. And now some scientists are willing to concede that information may be behind it all. I suppose this is one way to get esoteric, without losing your academic credentials.
By its very nature, the informational dimension of any thriving system is going to be dynamic and unpredictable. It is also how systems change and grow: including physical, biological, and economic ones, etc. In other words, entropy creates something new, but requires exotropy to integrate all the new information in the system.
George Gilder says, “All information is surprise; only surprise qualifies as information. This is the fundamental axiom of information theory. Information is the change between what we knew before the transmission and what we know after it.”
If we take this from the macrocosm down to the microcosm, this “surprise” depends exclusively on human agency because creativity comes from people, not from systems, who are part of systems. It is indicated by the idea of something new that defies prediction because that only works in closed systems. If a system is closed, it cannot experience the “surprise,” that infusion of new information that contributes to its survival and growth.
This is how creativity can create value through individuals willing to take risks investing their capital, prowess, and labor. Through this effort, new information is brought into light that others can't see or do. Gilder notes that this can fail when it violates a key principle of information theory: “It subordinates a higher and more complex level of activity — the creation of value — to a lower level, its measurement and exchange.”
This is the beauty of creativity via human agency, in that like the flow of information within a cable line, we can hone in on a signal from all the noise. Yet, our creative endeavors also require a stabilizing, grounding force, like the cable line itself. As Gilder notes, in our civilization this includes “moral codes, constitutional restraints, personal disciplines, educational integrity, predictable laws, reliable courts, stable money, trustworthy finance, strong families, dependable defense, and police powers.”
And so a key principle of information theory is that “it takes a low-entropy carrier to bear high-entropy creations.”
So dude, who did turn down the entropy?...
