How to think about health: Entropy

Material->Energy->Information

Summary

• There is a connection (in my mind) between entropy, health, and spirituality, and it exists at a level of complexity that few people are able to comprehend.

  • Entropy has evolved from an energetic concept, to a material concept, to a informational concept that transcends energy & materials. It can only be measured as the difference between two states. That is, entropy does not exist within a single state or at a single point in time, but exists only in the spaces in between.

  • Life requires a constant flow of negative entropy (i.e., exergy). Health is a measure of the constructive applcation of that negative entropy flow. Like entropy, health is best measured as the difference between two states. It is not something that can be assessed at a single point in time, but only as the rate of recovery from stress.

  • Like entropy, the negative entropy flow that sustains all life exists in an energetic dimension, a material dimension, and an informational dimension. The informational cannot be observed with the instruments of science that only respond to energetic and material worlds. The informational dimension of life is best interpeted as a spirit that transcends our current understanding of physics. Moreover, this spirit does not reside in one place—it is everywhere in the spaces inbetween.

Dissertation Block: Entropy

In early 2001 my dissertation in environmental engineering was stuck, and so was I.

There are at least 27 different definitions of entropy in the scientific literature, and I felt like I couldn’t understand any of them. Late nights of study after putting the kids to bed weren’t making any progress, so one particularly dark and depressing night I put myself to sleep with a little homework assignment I gave to my brain:

“Brain,” I implored. “Your job is to figure out what this entropy means. You work on that overnight while the rest of us inside this body go to sleep. Report back to me in the morning.”

It worked.

I woke up with a different, more complete understanding of entropy than I had when I’d gone to bed, and spent the next several months furiously finishing my dissertation in preparation for my doctoral defense and graduation.

What I didn’t realize those almost 25 years ago is that my nocturnal insights would eventually lead me to a powerful realization about health, and about life itself.

If you’re the type of person who enjoys geeking out on science, philosophy, and God, then this post is probably for you.

Life is Energy Flow

Erwin Schrödinger wrote a book called What Is Life (1944) that informed James Watson & Francis Crick’s discovery of DNA. Schrödinger was a theoretical physicist most famous for his eponymous equation modeling quantum mechanics. He was writing before the discovery of the double-helix structure of nucleic DNA, so his imagination wasn’t confused by a pre-occupation with genetic encoding structures. Instead, Schrödinger thought of life as a flow of energy.

Without energy, all material structure would eventually decompose into an indistinguishable, inert (and boring) mixture of chemicals at equilibrium—because of entropy.

Only a continuous flow of energy through the living organism can stave of the inevitable entropic decline of the living body.

James Lovelock applied this realization to space exploration in the 1960’s. At a time when the search for life on other planets seemed like an impossible proposition, Lovelock proposed to measure (remotely) the chemical state of a planet’s atmosphere. He reasoned that if the gases in the atmosphere were at chemical equilibrium, then the planet must be dead. If the chemistry of the atmosphere was far from equilibrium, then the planet could be alive.

For example, Earth’s atmosphere, consisting of about 21% oxygen, is far from chemical equilibrium. However, if all the plants and photosynthesizing creatures of Earth were somehow extinguished from Earth, the oxygen would be consumed and the atmosphere would decline towards boring equilibrium—at which time chemical activity and reactions would essentially cease.

Life = energy flow.

Clausius: Entropy is Not A Thing

The problem I was having was that entropy is not just one thing. The term was originally coined by German physicist Rudolf Clausius, who wanted to understand why a warm body will always cool down to room temperature, but never, ever, spontaneously warm up. Clausius measured the heat being transferred from the body to its environment, divided it by the temperature, and called this entropy.

He observed that heat always flows from a higher temperature body to a lower temperature, and never in reverse. This observation eventually led to what is known as the zeroth law of Thermodynamics, which states that any two bodies in thermal equilibrium with a third body must also be in thermodynamic equilibrium with one another.¹

So Clausius’ definition of entropy was based on heat transfer. Notice that there is no such thing as an entropy probe, or a heatometer for that matter. Although temperature is something that can be measured directly via a thermometer, heat can only be measured via transfer between two states.

To measure entropy, Clausius had to measure temperature, allow the body to cool, and measure temperature again, then derive the heat transferred from the warm body and only then could he calculate entropy.

Entropy cannot be measured at a single point in time, because it does not exist at a single state. Entropy is a property that only exists between two states.

Consequently, to think of entropy as a thing is incorrect. Entropy is the difference between two things.

Boltzmann: Entropy is Also Material

After Clausius, Ludwig Boltzmann realized that entropy could be observed even in the absence of heat transfer, because it also drives mixing. That is, when two pure gases are brought in contact with one another, they will eventually mix together into one homogeneous, indistinguishable mixture to achieve equilibrium.

That process of mixing results in an increase in entropy. Like temperature, Boltzmann reasoned that molecules always mix from more to less concentrated states, and never spontaneously become more concentrated all by themselves.

Then Boltzmann added a twist.

Although it is true that entropy always increases when concentrated mixtures become more dilute, and that this direction towards equilibrium is always observed in nature, he reasoned that it could be statistically possible for molecules to flow from dilute to more concentrated—however unlikely that seemed. So Boltzmann reformulated Clausius’ heat-based definition of entropy as a statistical property, and that opened the door to one of the most famous thought experiments in the history of theoretical physics.

Maxwell’s Daemon: Entropy is Information

James Clerk Maxwell posited a thought experiment based on Boltzmann’s insight. He suggested that a microscopic hypothetical creature he called a “daemon” could sort a mixed gas into two pure gases without energy expenditure, thus reducing the entropy of the system and defying the Second Law of Thermodynamics. In theory, the daemon would operate a friction-free valve that controlled the passage of molecules between two vessels. Although the gases in the vessels would begin as mixed, the daemon could open the valve whenever the random motion of one preferred molecule causes it to approach the gate, and shut it again whenever random molecules approached that the daemon did not want to allow to pass. In this way, the daemon could sort out the two gases, based only on their random motions, without expending energy.

A perpetual motion machine would result.

Maxwell’s Daemon has been the subject of intense discussion since 1867, when it was first posed. While a number of people have explained practical limitations on the operation of the daemon that seem to defend the absolute applicability of the Second Law, those arguments are not what’s really interesting.

What’s interesting is the agreement. Everyone has come to accept that for the daemon to climb the entropy wall, it must posses information about the type of gas, position, and velocity vectors of each molecule. We don’t know how the daemon would obtain this information, but there can be no correct operation of the hypothetical sort gate without it.

What that means is, to some extent, information is negative entropy. And negative entropy (negentropy) is just another word for energy. Thus, information can, under certain circumstances, be used to perform work.

Shannon: Information Theory

While working for Bell Labs on compression algos that would speed the transfer of data across expensive copper cables, Claude Shannon proposed a statistical measure of information content that was mathematically identical to Boltzmann’s entropy equation.

Remember that was Shannon who, as a remarkable Master’s student at MIT, essentially created the mathematical logic structures on which modern digital computing is based. Shannon’s was the most influential Master’s thesis in all of history. Its publication essentially marked the beginning of the end for the Industrial Revolution, and the genesis of the Information Age.

It was Boltzmann who decoupled entropy from energy, and discovered it could be applied exclusively to material. It was Maxwell who decoupled entropy from material, and discovered it could be applied exclusively to information. It was Shannon who created a quantitative measure of that information.

As the concept of entropy evolved, it became more general, more powerful, more abstract, and as a consequence more difficult to understand. It also gave us the scientific underpinnings of a revolution in technology and the economy, as we increasingly transition from an industrial economy in which value is created and stored in things to a digital economy is which value is created and stored in data.

What is Health?

The question that Schrödinger never posed, and no one in physics (to my knowledge) has ever taken seriously since is “What is Health?”

In the United States, we are now witnessing the ascension of a political movement called Make America Healthy Again (MAHA). It’s a wonderfully persuasive slogan derived from President Trump’s Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement, and it is most closely associated with Robert F Kennedy, Jr. and his political allies. Nonetheless, it’s not obvious to me that anyone in the movement, including Kennedy and MAHA CEO Del Bigtree, has given serious consideration to explaining what “health” is. Thus, the MAHA movement might be successful in organizing political and institution power and still remain rudderless with regard to guiding that power towards its own stated goal.

The problem is that understanding “What is health?” is a problem just as vexing as the problem of understanding entropy. For example, it is insufficient to suggest that health is “the absence of disease,” because a dead body no longer suffers disease. Moreover, health cannot be equated with longevity or thus measured in term of life expectancy, because no one except the pharmaceutical companies seeks to extend unhealthy lifespan. People seek to have long healthspans.

Nevertheless, since Schrödinger taught us that life is energy flow, we might do well to explore whether an analogy between entropy and health offers some philosophical insights.

I submit to you that it does.

Once we come to accept that entropy doe not represent the state of a system itself, but rather the journey between two states, we recognize that the same applies to health.

Health is not a state that can be measured at a single point in time. Health can only be observed as the rate of transit between two states: stress & recovery.

Thinking of health in this way changes everything. If it can only be observed in the transition between stress and recovery, then health is not whether you have broken bones (for example), but how quickly your bones heal.

In this way, health is the capacity of the body for adaptation and recovery from stress. It cannot exist without stress, and as a result we must seek stress to both observe and maintain good health.

Is There Something More?

If you’ve read this far, you might be one of those rare readers who is either familiar with or curious about experiments in quantum entanglement. To summarize the concept, allow me to describe its discovery. Scientists generated two subatomic particles at the same time, and sent them off in different directions. The quantum states of these particles were unknown, and so they had to be measured.

However, under such conditions only one measurement need be made, because as soon as the quantum state of the first particle is measured, the quantum state of the second particle is determined.

This is not a thought experiment. This experiment has already been carried out and repeated. It is predictable, repeatable, reliable… and theoretically impossible.

How can the two particles be linked over a distance so great that any energetic signal between them would have to travel faster than the speed of light to account for their entanglement?

I’m going to suggest to you right now that it is not material that passes between them. It is not energy that passes between them.

It is information—and information is not subject to the same laws of physics, such as the speed of light, that govern material and energy.

And I’m going to go even a little further.

We are all quantum beings. That is, the subatomic particle experiments are simplistic enough for physicists to observe this phenomenon of seemingly spontaneous energy transfer, but they are nothing compared to the quantum complexity of human consciousness.

In The Case Against Reality (2019) Donald Hoffman explores the question, “Where is the material seat of human consciousness?” Having studied with and collaborated with Crick (of Watson and Crick, above) he is embedded in a world of biologists who seemingly fetishize material structures. In his book, he suggests that there are some biologists who think consciousness emerges from the material structures within the body—either from the brain, or the DNA, or the mitochondria, or somewhere.

I think that view is backwards.

I believe that consciousness neither resides in nor emerges from the body. I believe that consciousness, like God, is everywhere all at once in the spaces between the bodies of individual human beings. Thus, our material structures are not the origin of consciousness. Rather, they are like antenna that tap into the consciousness that already exists, all around us.

You might ask, “If consciousness is every, all around us, then why can’t we observe or measure it, with all of our sensory powers and scientific instruments?”

My answer is that to some extent, we do. On some level, we know when we feel a connection to certain people—no matter how remote from us—and sometimes we gain access to that connection only in our dreams, or perhaps in some transcendent psychedelic state in which the noise of conscious thoughts are stripped away and the signal of consciousness becomes clear.

However, we cannot observe consciousness with our scientific instruments because these instruments are not alive. They do not exist in the world of consciousness and they lack the antennae required to commune with it. Scientific instruments are confined to the material and energetic world. They cannot access the information world that connects all humankind on a level that transcends material and energetic limitations.

That doesn’t mean that consciousness I’m proposing doesn’t exist. It only means that, like entropy and health, there is no probe, or meter, or instrument that will observe it.

1. The Laws of Thermodynamics are numbered in a confusing order. For example, the Second Law (or Entropy Law) was discovered prior to the First and the Zeroth Law was only formulated after the First and Second were already established.