Published -
April 2, 2025
Ever wonder why your smartphone and your brain have so much in common? No, it's not just that both contain your questionable search history. It turns out there's a deeper connection—one that might just rewrite how we understand everything from the first primordial ooze to the latest AI chatbot trying to convince you it's sentient.
Picture this: the universe has one fundamental rule—energy must spread out and become more disorganized over time. Physicists call this "increasing entropy," and it's the heartbeat of the second law of thermodynamics. It's why your coffee gets cold, why your bedroom gets messy, and why, ultimately, the universe will end in a lukewarm soup of particles.
But here's the plot twist: in some places, order seems to increase. Life emerges. Complexity builds. Consciousness develops. iPhones get thinner yet somehow more expensive.
What gives? Is life cheating the system?
Not quite. Instead, life is playing the game better than anything else.
Physicist Jeremy England flipped our understanding of life on its head when he suggested that living things aren't fighting against entropy—they're actually excellent at producing it. Life, it turns out, is remarkably good at taking in energy and dumping it back out in a more disorganized form.
Think about it: you eat a meticulously arranged salad (ordered energy), your body breaks it down, and out comes... well, we don't need to get graphic, but let's just say the output is considerably less organized than the input. Plus heat. Lots of heat. We're all just walking, talking entropy factories.
But there's a catch. To be really good at dissipating energy, you need to process information about your environment. You need to know where the energy is, how to get it, and what to do with it.
This is where things get fascinating. Systems that process information more effectively can dissipate energy more efficiently. And what happens to systems that are better at dissipating energy? They persist. They replicate. They evolve.
See where this is going?
Every major jump in evolution can be viewed as an upgrade in energy-dissipation efficiency:
Each step represents systems becoming better at the universe's primary directive: spread energy out more effectively.
Now here's the mind-bender: technology follows the exact same pattern.
From the first stone tools to modern AI, technology represents systems becoming increasingly efficient at processing information and, consequently, dissipating energy. Your smartphone uses energy to process information far more efficiently than earlier computers, which themselves were more efficient than human calculation.
When viewed through this lens, technology isn't separate from biological evolution—it's a continuation of the same process, just operating through different mechanisms and at a much faster pace.
This thermodynamic perspective predicts something remarkable: the natural convergence of biological and technological systems. We're already seeing the early stages:
These aren't just cool gadgets—they're the inevitable next steps in a thermodynamic evolution that's been running for billions of years.
Perhaps most fascinating is what this perspective tells us about consciousness itself. Rather than some mysterious emergent property, consciousness might be understood as a particularly effective way to dissipate energy through information processing.
By creating predictive models of our environment (and ourselves), conscious systems can more effectively harvest and utilize energy. The feeling of being aware, of experiencing the world, might just be what it feels like to be really, really good at entropy production.
This doesn't make consciousness any less amazing—if anything, it's more remarkable that the fundamental laws of thermodynamics would produce something as extraordinary as the experience of being alive and aware.
If this perspective is correct, we can make some educated guesses about where evolution is heading:
This thermodynamic perspective doesn't diminish the wonder of life or consciousness—it enhances it. We're not fighting against the universe's fundamental laws; we're their most sophisticated expression.
The next time you're doomscrolling on your phone, remember: in some strange way, both you and your device are manifestations of the same cosmic process—the universe's four-billion-year experiment in finding increasingly clever ways to move energy around.
And that experiment is just getting started.
