Fumfer Physics 22: Entropy, Order

In this philosophical-scientific exchange, Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner explore whether the universe distinguishes between matter and meaningful information. Their conversation moves from the cognitive processing of text to cosmological entropy, the “heat death” scenario, and whether civilization-generated order could influence universal information flow. Rosner suggests that while entropy increases globally, local systems—like planets and minds—can grow in order and information. Jacobsen draws analogies between human learning and cosmic evolution, proposing that advanced civilizations might sustain galactic order, potentially integrating themselves into the universe’s informational architecture.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Let us do some math. These require more improvisation, creativity, and visualization. You have a subjectivity in the universe. The universe is doing its regular informational business on the surface of a sphere—something spherical. These organisms evolve as a part of the Earth, a satellite. A sphere and a satellite evolve. They gain a little awareness. They start thinking: if they are built like us and have had a cultural system evolve like ours, they chop down whatever their foliage is, they print ink or some equivalent on it, and you end up with dead matter preserved with some agent to make it last centuries. However, it has visual scribbles on it, and they can process that as information.

What makes that organization of matter in a book somehow actionable information in the universe? Moreover, does the universe make any distinction between that? We examine it, and there is a perceptual decoding process for us. However, from the universe's perspective, there is no real difference, except that the contents of the mind are being reorganized in a more structured way between percepts and the formation of textually informed concepts in the mind based on the base percepts.

Rick Rosner: So a normally operating universe would likely have an increase of total information, at least some of the time—maybe even most of the time.

The universe would also experience an increase in order, and these phenomena are interconnected. However, a Big Bang universe experiences an increase in entropy and a decrease in order over its life cycle, provided it does not collapse and continues to expand. It is called the "heat death" of the universe. Eventually, the universe, as an endlessly expanding Big Bang universe with a constant amount of matter (more or less), loses energy.

It burns up all its fuel, and once the fuel is gone, there are no more hot spots. The universe eventually becomes increasingly uniform in temperature—not a high temperature, but an increasingly even one. That means there are no temperature differentials that can be used to do work.

The heat death of the universe—that is, a loss of usable energy, but not necessarily of total information. If you can dump off waste heat, an expanding Big Bang universe can still be considered a closed system thermodynamically. But an inflationary-cosmology universe has places to dump waste energy—

Jacobsen: You mean, like photons that escape local conditions?

Rosner: Exactly. Photons escape local conditions, which is almost all of them—and eventually, it is all of them. Even if a photon is captured, that heats the planet that absorbed it, and that planet eventually emits almost the same amount of energy as heat. So, essentially, everything turns into long-distance photons.

Those photons lose energy over long distances, and that energy is converted into order—into the structure of space itself—and that process is negentropic (meaning it locally resists entropy).

Jacobsen: I will interrupt you on a micro note—you are on my screen as "Carole Rosner." That is a different kind of information. It is doing actual decoding rather than the more direct processing used for, say, seeing the colour of your couch. Planets with civilizations on them are a local blip of high order. Our planet gets more ordered—accumulates more information—every second.

Rosner: This information is meaningful in a local context, but probably not in the context of the overall universe. There is some implicit information, but the universe does not have access to it. If the universe is a massive information processor, it is far too big to be aware of the goings-on of individual planets.

Now, if the universe—as an information processor—is an incredibly sophisticated and knowledgeable thing, then it can look at the size of its information space, the amount of information it must hold, and it can correctly assume that there is enough matter within that informational map of itself for life and civilizations to originate.

If we ever have a mathematization of consciousness—and I think we will—we will be able to examine the number of informational units in our brains and minds, and make reasonable assumptions about how many building blocks are available to evolve in some way, and what that evolution might look like. It certainly would not resemble life on planets in our universe, because we have, I do not know, 10⁷⁰ times fewer information units than the universe itself. It is a reasonable guess.

That does not give us the same scale the universe has for life to originate, but something could originate even in an information space as small as those in our brains. We would not know what that something is or the specifics. The same goes for events on planets with civilizations, pre-civilizations, or even spacefaring civilizations.

They are not notable within the total information the universe "knows" about itself—we are too small. However, that does not preclude long-lasting civilizations from becoming big enough and powerful enough to interfere with enough matter in the universe to become part of the noticeable order of the universe, possibly.

We know that the universe generally increases in order, in the same way our mental spaces increase in order over the span of our lives—until they start decaying. The more we learn, the more connections we make.

Given a healthy brain and body, we do most of our accumulation of order—our building of an internal model of the world—during our younger years. The net amount of information in our brains, if you count dendrites and neurons, might stay relatively stable for about 30 years in adulthood. However, it is possible that we still have an increasing amount of information as we learn to encode what we know more efficiently. I am not sure, but it is easy to imagine.

Our brains increase in order. It is easy to imagine, by analogy, that the universe also increases in order. That raises the question: if you have long-lasting enough civilizations that can manipulate matter, do the activities of those civilizations—when they are old and powerful enough—become part of the noticeable order of the universe? Do they become part of the information that the universe, in some sense, "registers"?

For instance, the Informational Cosmology model posits that galaxies can exhaust their gas and become dark, only to be reignited through the universe's associative network of matter.

If you direct enough energy along galactic filaments, you could theoretically reignite these galaxies—turn them "on"again. It is conceivable that a billion-year-old civilization could harness and exploit such processes, perhaps to maintain activity in their region of space or prevent local collapse.

If a civilization does not want to be part of the decay that happens when a galaxy runs out of energy, maybe they can "goose" galaxies back into activity. If so, they may become part of the universe's usable information-processing structure. I do not know, but it is not unreasonable to ask.

Rick Rosner is an accomplished television writer with credits on shows like Jimmy Kimmel Live!, Crank Yankers, and The Man Show. Over his career, he has earned multiple Writers Guild Award nominations—winning one—and an Emmy nomination. Rosner holds a broad academic background, graduating with the equivalent of eight majors. Based in Los Angeles, he continues to write and develop ideas while spending time with his wife, daughter, and two dogs.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen is the publisher of In-Sight Publishing (ISBN: 978-1-0692343) and Editor-in-Chief of In-Sight: Interviews (ISSN: 2369-6885). He writes for The Good Men Project, International Policy Digest (ISSN: 2332–9416), The Humanist (Print: ISSN 0018-7399; Online: ISSN 2163-3576), Basic Income Earth Network (UK Registered Charity 1177066), A Further Inquiry, and other media. He is a member in good standing of numerous media organizations.