The cost of local order
Systems ·
Life maintains its order and sustains itself by feeding on energy gradients and increasing entropy of the system it is a part of. Intelligence compounds onto this picture by helping life thrive by compressing experience into useful learnt models that can inform action. Fundamentally though, inherent to life and intelligence, is that to preserve order locally means to depend on processes that increase entropy more broadly.
Maintaining local organization → Increases entropy of the system
The exact origins of life remains unresolved, but one hypothesis suggests that it could be traced back to hydrothermal vents, where chemical gradients and mineral compartments supported early reactions. The dependence highlighted here is that living systems draw on usable energy to sustain themselves. This energy is used to regulate, repair, and replace parts of itself, while releasing heat and waste. This exchange allows structures and complexity that would otherwise break down to persist.
Intelligence → Compression
Inspired by Jürgen Schmidhuber’s Driven by Compression Progress, I see an important part of intelligence as progress in useful compression: discovering structure that lets a compact learned model explain more of our subjective experience.
Intelligence → Compression → Maintains local organization → Increases entropy of the system
These models connect understanding to survival. A model that helps an organism find food and avoid danger turns experience into actions that help sustain itself. Maintaining these models and acting on them both require energy.
In the grander scheme of things, as life proliferates, resources are more broadly needed to build and sustain living systems. Intelligence helps to reinforce this process: better understanding helps us access and utilize said resources, which supports further growth and learning. More capable models expand what we do with the energy and matter available to us. Efficiency lowers the cost of individual activities, but growth broadly increases the total energy throughput and entropy production. Our capacity to thrive remains tied to this exchange.