Entropy is one of the most profound and multifaceted concepts in physics. It is not energy itself, nor is it a mere abstraction — it is a quantifiable physical property rooted in the microscopic behavior of systems. Like the core insight of Temporal Rights, entropy offers an existential view of nature but from a different perspective. Formally known as the Second Law of Thermodynamics, it was discovered almost two centuries ago and has guided physics with a reliable hand since. It is remarkable for its ability to shed light on many phenomena that seem distant from Physics. I believe this is due to the fact that it is intimately tied to the most fundamental physical processes in the same way Temporal Rights is grounded.

The unity between the two has been deeply reassuring. When this investigator ventured into unfamiliar space, there was a natural fear of the potential unraveling of my favorite new theory. But entropy has proven to be not only a happy companion but a revealing observer. In fact, the entropic vocabulary conveys the ethics of Temporal Rights more effectively and efficiently (with lower entropy) than any other framework. By grounding natural rights in objectively observable operator capabilities, the corresponding rights must harmonize with entropy because both perspectives are existential. Temporal Rights and entropy are rooted in raw physics, so the two points of view unify the physical and moral universes into a single governing framework.

The Entropy Concept

Here’s a statement from Rudolf Clausius (1850): “No process is possible whose sole result is the transfer of heat from a body of lower temperature to a body of higher temperature without external work. Heat flows spontaneously only from hot to cold; refrigerators require energy input. A perpetual motion machine is impossible.”

And then a formal definition: “In any isolated system, the total entropy never decreases over time. Entropy (disorder) tends to increase in spontaneous processes; time has a directional ‘arrow.'”

Unfortunately, entropy is a negative concept, which makes it inherently confusing. If we want to reduce waste, conserve energy, or simplify information, we have to lower entropy, so it increases with waste, loss, disorder, and confusion. There is a word for “good” entropy, but it doesn’t really help because it sounds very negative: “negentropy”.

The second law of thermodynamics is where entropy was born. It basically says that when you put an ice cube in your coffee, the coffee will get colder and the ice cube will melt, but never the other way around. It is the recognition that fundamental, simple natural processes move matter towards complete disorder. Sir Arthur Eddington noted the transfer of heat caused by a difference in temperature takes time and famously wrote, “The law that entropy always increases — the second law of thermodynamics — holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. […] But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.” [The Nature of the Physical World, 1928, page 74]

How Entropy Works

Some examples of entropy in action will help. 

A refrigerator is required for the creation of ice cubes, and ice, the crystal form of water, is a more ordered structure than the liquid. Temperature is actually the measure of the activity of the atoms. As things are cooled, this activity decreases, and they become more stable as they move toward absolute zero, where that activity stops altogether. The more ordered states of things are low entropy states. Ice melting increases entropy as molecules gain freedom and become more active as temperature rises.

A puff of smoke released in a room will spread out until it is uniformly distributed. A

Surprisingly, this even applies to information. When knowledge of an advantageous stock purchase is used, the advantage begins to disappear as others recognize it and act. Use of the advantage disperses until it disappears like a drop of food color in a glass of water, and for the same reason. Facts you have acquired will be lost unless you reinforce them from time to time.

The acquisition and maintenance of truth is an intentional, energy-consuming project. In fact, progress of any type, the organization of information and matter into higher, more efficient, and useful forms is an intentional. energy-consuming process, while decay and disorder occur naturally. Social media is demonstrating this in an alarming way: a post revealing a pretty fundamental truth or fact receives comments, and those comments (not the original post) receive further comments, and so the process cascades into chaos, where there is no discernable truth.

After a rain, the surface dries out as water evaporates reducing the concentration at the surface. Days later, the soil appears dry but the rain water is still moving up and evaporating. Placing a barrier on the surface for a day will make the soil surface wet as the previous rain moves up to evenly disperse itself.

So entropy is a measure of disorder in a system — the more disordered (random) a system becomes, the higher its entropy, and the less energy remains available to perform useful work. For example, a messy house where chaos is evident, is a high entropy environment where less energy is available for useful work.

Some other examples: It takes much energy and time to construct a house, a highly ordered structure, but it can be destroyed in a few minutes. A trusting relationship takes many transactions to build but that trust can be destroyed in a single act. Decay of all types in an organized structure (tree, building, family) is increasing entropy. 

Entropy and Life

So building a home, organizing the stuff inside, making babies, and teaching them to be good citizens are all studies in negentropy. Getting old, dying, and decomposition are what happen when the supporting negentropic processes slow to balance entropy and then lose out to inexorable entropy. This is the truth behind “You cannot stand still, but must constantly choose between progress and regression. Acquired skills, knowledge, and virtues must be nourished or lost.

The cycle of life: successful reproduction, growth, maturity, aging, and death can be seen as just cold physics, and unfortunately, there are religious beliefs that focus on this nihilistic view. The Temporal Rights “religion” reveals a universe of purpose, value, joy, and glory. The wonderful thing about this religion is that it is founded existentially.

Why Freedom is Not Optional

In the Temporal Rights vocabulary, operators must preserve the conditions of their existence or succumb. The crucial condition is freedom, without which capabilities are inhibited or lost, and this loss can happen so slowly as to be imperceptible.

Our democratic Republic is in great danger because its operators have lost sight of the necessary conditions of their flourishing. Both tyranny and freedom contain the seeds of their own demise: the protection of freedom engenders investment, investment leads to wealth, wealth to idleness, idleness to sophistry, sophistry to excess, excess to decay, decay to tyranny, and tyranny to poverty and the recognition of rights, and thus to revolution. We are now in the decay-to-tyranny phase and about to lose the protection of rights afforded by 250 years under 51 amazing constitutions, and the first signs of revolution are upon us. Half the population is mesmerized by wealth, idleness, and sophistry.

Entropic Operators of Temporal Rights

The definition of an operator states that any agent of change can be correctly perceived as an operator. This is a profoundly universal point of view, and I confess that stating it gives me pause. I think it will stand the test of time, but I am not willing to bet my life on it. I marvel that it seems to hold when any level of a stack of operators is chosen, i. e., an atom, a molecule, a compound, a protein, a leaf, a branch, a tree, and maybe even a forest (an abstraction), are all valid operators and seemingly can be selected at any level convenient to the consideration at hand. The testing of this concept needs the skills of a set theorist, I suppose.

Entropy and Information

In the information world, clear concise dialog is information dense exhibiting lower entropy while jumbled, confusing words are high-entropy and there is less energy available for communication.

This explains why artificial intelligence computers are very high energy consumers. They ingest your prompt, tokenize it to convert it into discrete meaning chunks, then do this massive exercise of comparing those to billions of other chunks (their knowledge base) and watch for coherence and meaning, then convert those harmonious chunks back into their response. The process is very expensive because it really has no innate intelligence. It almost has to examine all the possible combinations of these chunks to be sure it has the best one.

A computer program is an interesting case study. A programmer creates the program by instilling intelligence into some form of matter. Years ago, it would have been punch cards; now its stored in electronic so called state machines, memory chips or magnetic domains on metal disks. The point is this intelligence can only persist when it is somehow embedded in some kind of matter. This is true of all information, including the intelligent structure of a tree that guides the way it grows.

The point is this: when the substrate decays or is otherwise disturbed or destroyed, the intelligence is the first to go and that is a high-entropy process similar to a house burning down. This connection between operators that form structures and the negentropic processes of that formation are sufficiently intrinsic to be properly called existential. That’s why entropy and Temporal Rights are mostly two ways of articulating or describing the same phenomena.

Entropy in the Temporal Rights Framework

Remembering that operators are agents of any size we recognize that atoms and molecules are valid operators exercising their rights as capabilities, and that these behave exactly as the second law of thermodynamics dictates. Entropy measures the “spread” or “freedom” of operators: the degree to which micro-operators assert their capabilities to move and occupy available space, rather than remaining constrained in a highly specified arrangement.

In the physical universe the domains of various operators overlap forming conditions where some operators try to spread out while others pack them together, as we saw in the refrigerator. In every case, Temporal Rights operators behave as the second law describes.

Entropy and Ethics

Ethics can be understood as the conscious effort to create and maintain local order (low entropy) while minimizing unnecessary increases in overall entropy. It is easy to see that conflict is high entropy while harmony is low. 

This is not just metaphorically true because it parallels physical phenomena, these ethical principles guide physical organization that creates more complex, information dense, stronger structures, and/or more peaceful arrangements.

We are talking about organizations from national governments down through towns, and families, marriages, and friendships.

Entropy and Ethics and Temporal Rights

The morality dimension of Temporal Rights is clear as soon as you realize the beaver is killing the tree, and the tree’s impending entropic demise taken together, illustrate the existential connections of the three constructs.

Autonegentropy

I have coined this new word to identify an inevitable side effect of entropy, viz. Negentropy. The Temporal Rights framework demonstrates the inevitability of entropy causing negentropy, at least in some domains. Here multiple operators use their entropic capabilities in their overlapping dominions in a process that organizes new higher-order operators with their superior natural rights. This expansion of rights insight is a rather unique contribution to science in general and entropy in particular. By grounding natural rights in physics rather than sentience, social contract, or metaphysics, Temporal Rights newly recognizes an ancient natural process that creates new natural rights. I named the process autonegentropy because I discovered it while study the relationship between natural rights and entropy.

An example of autonegentropy: when gravity gathers a diffuse cloud of space dust, the particles accelerate as they fall together and the conservation of momentum creates spirals that form solar systems, planets, and their moons. The process releases heat which is radiated away entropically, but these new cosmic structures are higher-order operators than random, chaotic dust. Then planets provide a platform where other entropic processes may produce their own negentropic structures, which, in turn are also higher-order entities. The remarkable insight here is that each new level of order brings forth new capabilities, and therefore new natural rights emerge as higher-order temporal operators come into existence.

It is important to note that although that process seemed undirected and therefore fully automatic, it absolutely was not. Gravity, a capability of mass and inertia, another capability, did the work. Gravity mutually pulled the particles together and inertia, manifested as the conservation of momentum, caused the rotation. To state that in the Temporal Rights vocabulary: multiple operators (dust particles) in their overlapping domains (cloud) used their capabilities (gravity) to organize higher-order operators (planets, etc).

Stating the process in those terms lets us see that the tree branch with its leaves is also an autonegentropic process, except that the addition of intrinsic intelligence gives rise to much more complex operators, viz., leaves, seeds, and trees. The leaf is a primary entropic processor, exhibiting both entropy and negentropy. It uses sunlight, gases, and minerals in the presence of the catalyst chlorophyll to organize complex sugars, starches, and cellulose in a clear negentropic process. Meanwhile, it is exhausting gases, water, and heat in an entropic process, making photosynthesis a fine example of autonegentropy. Please note in passing that this process is enabled by the intelligence embedded in the structure of the leaf.

Jurisprudence Guided by Entropy

One of the great challenges of jurisprudence is to properly define “harm”. Temporal Rights recognizes harm as an immoral violation of natural rights. The question then becomes, “What is immoral?” The AIMM answers that question based strictly and narrowly on the question of natural rights while honoring the natural hierarchy of rights. Killing asparagus for dinner is clearly a moral event and how can we discern whether it is immoral?

Remembering that a capability identifies a corresponding right, the AIMM answers the question by identifying the capability that the killing operator used and then identifying the capability that was destroyed, and finally comparing them to one another. Since the Dependency Stack consists of levels of the natural hierarchy of rights, each level has a number, the difference between the two levels reflects the severity of the violation and the sign of the number reveals whether it is moral or immoral. This description sounds like a mechanical device trying to masquerade as a righteous judge. So lets try the entropic description.

The Dependency Stack stops being only a capabilities hierarchy and becomes a complexity spectrum additionally. The identification of the levels of complexity utilized and harmed by a moral incident enables an entropy calculation where the algebra works as above, and the resolution of the question of moral/immoral is a determination of whether the case in question was entropic or negentropic. Or, in other words, a cow exhibits a level of complexity and the grass it destroys by consumption has a lower order. Therefore, the universe is gaining complexity (negentropy) by the death of the grass, which makes the cow’s consumption ethically good.

This works better than one would think. For example, if a hunter kills a moose in order to have the antlers only, wasting the high order complexity that was the moose, his action is immoral because the universe lost complexity with almost no gain: “almost” because there is some moral value in the appreciation of nature’s beauty, etc. However, if the hunter consumes the flesh of the animal, both entropy and the dependency stack value the event as moral and good.

If we then extend these observations, it says something about the power of love, that high order capability. One of my favorite proverbs is that love is the most powerful force in the universe because it never forces anything. This seeming contradiction is in harmony with many other observations, including the morality of destruction just outlined.

An entropic perspective on nature reveals some very interesting attributes of ancient traditions and morality. Because complex structures exhibit more value, it identifies a pregnant women as an exceptionally high-ordered creature, a married couple aggregate operator becomes one of similarly high value, particularly if they are bound together by contract, and then as they honor that covenant they continue to raise their value because of the on-going stability of that operator. A family is also a valid aggregate operator, and one bound together by covenants pushes that family even higher.

It follows that a nation can make itself into a high-order aggregate operator by unifying itself by covenant, as the citizenship pledge does in the United States of America. Disunity cripples and degrades such an operator, a fact sensed by every American today.

Entropy and Evolution

Autonegentropy is, I believe a fact of physical existence, a phenomenon that moves an entropic universe to create higher local states (such as life forms) while, in fact, running down to a lower state overall. It is the inevitable recoil of that bow that launches “time’s arrow”. So let’s now find that bow.

Evolution had to begin with single cells, so we will begin with a thorough analysis of that cell. Here’s a list of the capabilities (Temporal Rights) that it must demonstrate at a minimum:

• Sensibility: It must sense the presence of usable energy; food
• Action: It must select food while deselecting poisons (filtering)
• Aquisition: It must ingest food in a protected way that precludes self-corruption
• Consumption: It must consume more food than it needs to survive (entropy)
• Excretion: It must dispose of waste products to preclude self-corruption
• Remember: It must exhibit sufficient structural stability (intelligence) to sustain the above operations
• Replication: It must be able to reproduce itself within a relatively short time
• Existence: It must demonstrate all the above capabilites almost in the instant of its temporal creation
• Entropy: It must defy the inexorable second law of thermodynamics
• In conclusion: It must be a miracle.

What is a Miracle?

A miracle is a phenomenon that is inexplicable in the context of present understanding. Ages ago, the wind was a miracle explained by God literally blowing with his mouth. We have figured out a few things since then, and the “need for God” to explain many things has dwindled down to a few, like the requirements of the single cell. Many people read between the lines of this historic fact and suppose that the implications are so great that they can summarily dismiss God as a figment of our imagination. This dismissal is very convenient to a lifestyle that enjoys excess, domination, selfishness, greed, and/or the pressing of particular virtues to the extent they can justify vice, which intrinsically makes those virtues vices. The greatest evils have always been done in the name of God or virtue.

This dismissal of God in the face of scientific progress is aptly demonstrated by the old tale that goes something like this:

A few “scientists” approach God and declare that he is not needed any longer because they have been able to create life. God replies, “Interesting, can you demonstrate that for me?” The scientists gleefully answer, “Yes, and we will start with dirt just like you did.” They then begin to gather up some soil but God interrupts with, “Hey, just a minute there! That’s my dirt! You go get your own dirt!”

(I put quotes around “scientists” to emphasize that so far, scientists have never been 100% scientific. That is really not their fault because 100% is intrinsically impossible. More on that later.)

The point is that it is a profound false dichotomy to assume that explaining how God did stuff automatically dismisses him. For example, the Temporal Rights point of view describes how “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights” was done, but then, like any other discovery, it asks even more questions. In this case, the central question is “How can it be that a deterministic, cause and effect universe simultaneously demonstrates existential morality? Is it because love is the most powerful force in the universe because it never forces anything? Or is it

Why does the material universe describe how a factory produces cars, only emphasizes dependency upon the factory.

But the miracle is this: Well, that is one way to look at it. But that has insurmountable problems.