Great leapfrog into the application of natural balance. Two thoughts.
1. Humans are apex on Earth right now but we are watching a function of behavioral natural selection happening before our eyes: First World Nations are pending a population collapse. Nature is trimming the 'herd'.
2. I live in Tucson and am very familiar with those exact swales. In fact, there are thousands more (also called Tanks) across the region. In fact, I've built 4 smaller ones on my own property with dozens of rock check-dams in the washes. There's a great book on Dryland Water Harvesting by Brad Lancaster you can find on Amazon: https://amzn.to/4ukjf8t
What’s the difference between nature and poorly designed systems? If we are natural… then evolution is trimming the poorly designed system just like the beavers of yesteryear who didn’t build good dams and got eaten vs. the beavers who built good dams (systems)
I agree with your central argument that humans are not unnatural. The accusation has always struck me as incoherent. Humans emerged from the same evolutionary processes as beavers, ants, cyanobacteria, and oak trees. Whatever humans do, however destructive or creative, is as natural as anything else in the universe.
But I think your essay takes one step too far.
You correctly dismantle the idea that nature provides a pristine state against which human behaviour can be judged. Yet having removed one source of meaning, you immediately replace it with another. "Anti-entropy" becomes the new moral compass. Complexity, harmony, resilience, and order become the things toward which we ought to strive.
My question is simple: why?
The universe does not appear to care whether a system becomes more complex or less complex. It does not care whether a rainforest flourishes or burns, whether a civilization rises or collapses, whether a species survives or disappears. The same laws that permit life also permit extinction. The same cosmos that produced Mozart produced supernovae. Nature offers no verdict.
As an absurdist, I see no evidence that the universe wants anything at all.
This is where I part company with both environmental romantics and modern Stoics. The environmental romantic looks at nature and sees innocence. The Stoic looks at nature and sees reason. I look at nature and see indifference.
That is not a criticism of nature. It is simply an observation.
The problem with deriving ethics from entropy, harmony, geometry, or complexity is that they remain descriptions of what is, not prescriptions of what ought to be. A cancer is natural. A parasite is natural. A famine is natural. A rainforest is natural. A galaxy is natural. None of these phenomena contain moral instructions.
To say that we should promote complexity because complexity has survived is merely to note that some forms persisted longer than others. Survival is a fact. Meaning is something else entirely.
Where I think humans are unique is not that we are nature's prefrontal cortex. It is that we are perhaps the only creatures capable of recognising the silence of the universe and acting anyway.
We build schools not because the cosmos demands education.
We love our children not because evolution commands it.
We create art not because geometry requires it.
We choose these things.
The absurd condition is that there is no ultimate justification beyond the choice itself.
Ironically, I think this places a greater responsibility on us, not a lesser one. If the universe contains no objective purpose, then every purpose is our responsibility. We cannot outsource morality to nature, entropy, God, evolution, or mathematics. We must decide.
That is why I find the modern discussion around humanity's relationship with nature so fascinating. The question is not whether humans are natural. We obviously are. The question is what kind of world we wish to create now that we possess the power to reshape both landscapes and minds.
It's a common sentiment, and I get where you're coming from. Just to be clear, though, I never claimed the universe cares. I'm curious, though. If we stripped out the idea of intelligence and anything smacking of woo woo, and just went with the ethics that the astrophysicist Dr. Eric Chaisson infers from cosmic evolution, do you find that palateable?
For instance, he thinks entropy/negentropy/energy rate density suggests approaches to things like solar power, treating cancer, the symbiosis of man and intelligent machines, and systemic optimality over extremes.
The universe has no preferences, but it has constraints. We can't help but have drives and preferences, and understanding the universe's conditions and how the blind process of evolution configured us informs us on how to best proceed.
Admittedly I never understood the point (as opposed to the concept) of is/ought and the emphasis placed on it. You already have oughts woven into your temperament and better understanding reality necessarily alters how you go about them. We have no trouble at all subjectively synthesizing is and ought a hundred times per day until we put on our oversized thinking cap and insist that it can't be done.
I agree that the universe imposes constraints and that humans arrive equipped with drives, preferences, and temperaments. We are not blank slates.
Where I would push back is that constraints operate at multiple levels, and I think it is easy to accidentally collapse them into one another.
Physics constrains biology.
Biology constrains development.
Development constrains cognition.
Cognition constrains culture.
But none of these levels is reducible to the one below it.
For example, evolution may give us tendencies towards attachment, competition, curiosity, aggression, cooperation, tribalism, and status-seeking. Yet those tendencies do not tell us which should be encouraged, restrained, celebrated, or discouraged. Biology provides appetite; it does not provide a final moral verdict.
My own interest is developmental. We often look at an adult and assume their temperament, neurotype, beliefs, or cognitive style were somehow present from the beginning. Increasingly, I think that is an illusion. Development creates the appearance of inevitability after the fact.
The question that fascinates me is not simply what constraints exist, but which constraints act when, at what level, and with what degree of reversibility.
I recently wrote about this in a piece called *We Are Not Born Human. We Become Human*. The central argument is that humanity, cognition, and even neurotype are developmental achievements rather than merely genetic revelations.
I'd be interested in your thoughts:
I suspect our disagreement is less about whether constraints exist and more about whether values emerge from those constraints or whether they remain something we must choose ourselves.
I have arrived independently on virtually exactly this set of notions. I think we should reclaim the rare word "Extropy" from the transhumanists to denote transformation toward structure and a resistance and reversal of entropy more broadly. It's both more specific and more robust than "humanitarianism," egalitarianism or any other guiding star to emerge post-religion because the resulting systems needing to be self-resilient is built into the concept and the canvas is already constrained by the hard laws of the universe and evolution.
Any morality system that self-annihilates - virtually all morals governing the west right now - should be dismissed on their face as entropic, regardless of how nice and kind they sound or how callous it sounds to reject them. You can't save a drowning person if you're drowning too, nor can you expand an over-capacity lifeboat by hacking at its structure, no matter how deeply one believes that structure is inhibiting the boat rather than making its function possible.
Andrew, this was a very dense essay and I had to come back to reread it today. Thanks for that!
After reading some of the comments, I suppose I describe myself as an Existentialist-curious environmentally romantic Stoic, but that may be the philosophical equivalent of trying to divide by zero!
Anyway, from your essay I have a couple of questions.
1) I think you’d agree that entropy itself is a natural process. Nature works cyclically, after all. Over population, famine, and rebounding. Death and rebirth. Like forest fires, some level of entropy is healthy and necessary for the system to work. But virtue, at least as the Stoics see it, is all or nothing. How does this fit in with a system that demands balance?
2) Nassim Taleb reveals that the ultimate test of fragility is time. So, when we look at ecosystems that have existed for millennia we must recognize that something about them is working in survival terms, whether we understand it or not. You mentioned this writing about rainforests. But I would qualify modern human interference with natural processes in the form of parking lots, genetic engineering, chemical engineering, and energy consumption at data center levels is of a different kind that terraforming the land. I think it is unnatural and unethical. And my basis for saying that is that it is intervention in a complex system (nature) that is totally untested by time. We have no conception of the higher order effects of these actions and, in fact, can articulate a good deal of harm to systems that have worked for extremely long periods of time.
Good questions. I hope my answers are not too rambling.
Question 1
The 2nd law of thermodynamics and observations made by astronomers/physicists agree that the universe is moving toward greater entropy across its vastness. Like 99% or more of it. But in the parts undergoing entropic decay, there is a transfer of energy to a far smaller number of increasingly ordered parts. In localized, open systems—areas that can exchange energy and matter with their surroundings—entropy can drastically decrease, leading to an increase in order, complexity, and structure. For a small pocket of the universe to become more ordered, it must actively export disorder to its greater environment (the Universe as a whole)
It’s true that in a closed system (the universe) it is necessary for entropy to exist. And as a whole, it will get more disordered. But in a open system like Earth, there is no absolute need for the system to maintain an entropy balance point. If we add more order, we do not have to “suffer” and have more disorder (here on Earth).
Earth receives high-quality, low-entropy energy from the Sun (shortwave solar radiation). Earth uses this energy to drive wind, ocean currents, and biological life (all highly ordered systems). Earth then "dumps" its excess entropy by radiating low-quality, high-entropy thermal energy (longwave infrared radiation) back out into the cold vacuum of space.
There is a way that this is true on Earth, in the sense that various localized disorders (fire, flood) can free up nutrients and create new niches for growth.
But I’m not actually sure that on earth that, “some level of entropy is healthy and necessary for the system to work,” at least not in the long-term land degradation, desertification, complexity, harmony, pollution sense. It’s usually a result of “open loops” in human engineering, failing to use the sun’s energy to power circular, closed-loop processes on earth.
So I think, in the Stoic sense, that the Stoic isn’t trying to oppose every fire and flood, just as he isn’t trying to stop death. But on net, one can be building negentropy locally or globally or perhaps one day beyond Earth.
Question 2
Just as a conservative and a liberal can both earnestly argue that they’ve designed their tax system around justice and wisdom, but have contradictory policies, two people might seek negentropy differently. It's an absolute standard with infinitely subjective applications.
But everything Lindy today was once new. They must begin their perseverance test at some point by definition. Only time will tell if they’re disasters of fruitful and resilient. I think a lot of things going on today will fade in time. I’m not comfortable with many of them myself. That’s where the discernment comes in, which we can only utilize in the limited sphere where we have control.
As for the intervention in complex systems part, I agree there is risk. But humans been intervening in complex systems for 300,000 years, often botching it. We’ve destroyed and degraded so much. I don’t think going in with a better set of patterns and trying to set things back toward negentropy is in any way immoral, and probably of far lesser risk. Since in many cases they're already pretty degraded, there's not so much further than can fall (but hey, man is creative in its destruction, so there's always more!)
This is really good stuff and thanks for taking the time for such an in-depth reply! I see your points. Mostly related to Q2, I think I need a clearer understanding of what constitutes human negentropy. Is it tech advances and practices that specifically retain the beauty and non-destructive efficiency of natural laws and processes? If that’s the case, then I may be persuaded.
Well, negentropy as it's classically defined isn't usually concerned with whether the complexity/harmony/order/energy forms something beautiful or full of wildlife/greenery so long as it works. So a city of concrete and asphalt might work if you could somehow make it sustainable.
But what I tried to add in here by bringing in Vitruvius and the underlying resilient patterns like the golden ratio is that they all make things stronger, more utilitarian, and more beautiful. That's the piece I'm trying to bring in. That actually, negentropy works better when we rely on these natural patterns.
How exactly that plays out will be varied, but I suspect it will vector in the right direction.
Great leapfrog into the application of natural balance. Two thoughts.
1. Humans are apex on Earth right now but we are watching a function of behavioral natural selection happening before our eyes: First World Nations are pending a population collapse. Nature is trimming the 'herd'.
2. I live in Tucson and am very familiar with those exact swales. In fact, there are thousands more (also called Tanks) across the region. In fact, I've built 4 smaller ones on my own property with dozens of rock check-dams in the washes. There's a great book on Dryland Water Harvesting by Brad Lancaster you can find on Amazon: https://amzn.to/4ukjf8t
1) That could be. But I wonder if it's nature or just poorly designed systems.
2) I didn't know about the tanks. But Brad is awesome. Glad you're experimenting with some swales.
What’s the difference between nature and poorly designed systems? If we are natural… then evolution is trimming the poorly designed system just like the beavers of yesteryear who didn’t build good dams and got eaten vs. the beavers who built good dams (systems)
Well said. I assumed you meant something else.
**The Universe Does Not Care**
Andrew,
I agree with your central argument that humans are not unnatural. The accusation has always struck me as incoherent. Humans emerged from the same evolutionary processes as beavers, ants, cyanobacteria, and oak trees. Whatever humans do, however destructive or creative, is as natural as anything else in the universe.
But I think your essay takes one step too far.
You correctly dismantle the idea that nature provides a pristine state against which human behaviour can be judged. Yet having removed one source of meaning, you immediately replace it with another. "Anti-entropy" becomes the new moral compass. Complexity, harmony, resilience, and order become the things toward which we ought to strive.
My question is simple: why?
The universe does not appear to care whether a system becomes more complex or less complex. It does not care whether a rainforest flourishes or burns, whether a civilization rises or collapses, whether a species survives or disappears. The same laws that permit life also permit extinction. The same cosmos that produced Mozart produced supernovae. Nature offers no verdict.
As an absurdist, I see no evidence that the universe wants anything at all.
This is where I part company with both environmental romantics and modern Stoics. The environmental romantic looks at nature and sees innocence. The Stoic looks at nature and sees reason. I look at nature and see indifference.
That is not a criticism of nature. It is simply an observation.
The problem with deriving ethics from entropy, harmony, geometry, or complexity is that they remain descriptions of what is, not prescriptions of what ought to be. A cancer is natural. A parasite is natural. A famine is natural. A rainforest is natural. A galaxy is natural. None of these phenomena contain moral instructions.
To say that we should promote complexity because complexity has survived is merely to note that some forms persisted longer than others. Survival is a fact. Meaning is something else entirely.
Where I think humans are unique is not that we are nature's prefrontal cortex. It is that we are perhaps the only creatures capable of recognising the silence of the universe and acting anyway.
We build schools not because the cosmos demands education.
We love our children not because evolution commands it.
We create art not because geometry requires it.
We choose these things.
The absurd condition is that there is no ultimate justification beyond the choice itself.
Ironically, I think this places a greater responsibility on us, not a lesser one. If the universe contains no objective purpose, then every purpose is our responsibility. We cannot outsource morality to nature, entropy, God, evolution, or mathematics. We must decide.
That is why I find the modern discussion around humanity's relationship with nature so fascinating. The question is not whether humans are natural. We obviously are. The question is what kind of world we wish to create now that we possess the power to reshape both landscapes and minds.
Nature will not answer that question for us.
The universe will remain silent.
The answer, if there is one, must come from us.
It's a common sentiment, and I get where you're coming from. Just to be clear, though, I never claimed the universe cares. I'm curious, though. If we stripped out the idea of intelligence and anything smacking of woo woo, and just went with the ethics that the astrophysicist Dr. Eric Chaisson infers from cosmic evolution, do you find that palateable?
For instance, he thinks entropy/negentropy/energy rate density suggests approaches to things like solar power, treating cancer, the symbiosis of man and intelligent machines, and systemic optimality over extremes.
His paper discusses many of these issues and how he infers them: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/rsfs/article/15/6/20250022/366163/Cosmic-evolution-might-unify-natural-science-and
Personally, while there's much to agree with, I think some of it could become a bit ethically unhinged.
The universe has no preferences, but it has constraints. We can't help but have drives and preferences, and understanding the universe's conditions and how the blind process of evolution configured us informs us on how to best proceed.
Admittedly I never understood the point (as opposed to the concept) of is/ought and the emphasis placed on it. You already have oughts woven into your temperament and better understanding reality necessarily alters how you go about them. We have no trouble at all subjectively synthesizing is and ought a hundred times per day until we put on our oversized thinking cap and insist that it can't be done.
GB,
I think we agree more than we disagree.
I agree that the universe imposes constraints and that humans arrive equipped with drives, preferences, and temperaments. We are not blank slates.
Where I would push back is that constraints operate at multiple levels, and I think it is easy to accidentally collapse them into one another.
Physics constrains biology.
Biology constrains development.
Development constrains cognition.
Cognition constrains culture.
But none of these levels is reducible to the one below it.
For example, evolution may give us tendencies towards attachment, competition, curiosity, aggression, cooperation, tribalism, and status-seeking. Yet those tendencies do not tell us which should be encouraged, restrained, celebrated, or discouraged. Biology provides appetite; it does not provide a final moral verdict.
My own interest is developmental. We often look at an adult and assume their temperament, neurotype, beliefs, or cognitive style were somehow present from the beginning. Increasingly, I think that is an illusion. Development creates the appearance of inevitability after the fact.
The question that fascinates me is not simply what constraints exist, but which constraints act when, at what level, and with what degree of reversibility.
I recently wrote about this in a piece called *We Are Not Born Human. We Become Human*. The central argument is that humanity, cognition, and even neurotype are developmental achievements rather than merely genetic revelations.
I'd be interested in your thoughts:
I suspect our disagreement is less about whether constraints exist and more about whether values emerge from those constraints or whether they remain something we must choose ourselves.
I have arrived independently on virtually exactly this set of notions. I think we should reclaim the rare word "Extropy" from the transhumanists to denote transformation toward structure and a resistance and reversal of entropy more broadly. It's both more specific and more robust than "humanitarianism," egalitarianism or any other guiding star to emerge post-religion because the resulting systems needing to be self-resilient is built into the concept and the canvas is already constrained by the hard laws of the universe and evolution.
Any morality system that self-annihilates - virtually all morals governing the west right now - should be dismissed on their face as entropic, regardless of how nice and kind they sound or how callous it sounds to reject them. You can't save a drowning person if you're drowning too, nor can you expand an over-capacity lifeboat by hacking at its structure, no matter how deeply one believes that structure is inhibiting the boat rather than making its function possible.
Andrew, this was a very dense essay and I had to come back to reread it today. Thanks for that!
After reading some of the comments, I suppose I describe myself as an Existentialist-curious environmentally romantic Stoic, but that may be the philosophical equivalent of trying to divide by zero!
Anyway, from your essay I have a couple of questions.
1) I think you’d agree that entropy itself is a natural process. Nature works cyclically, after all. Over population, famine, and rebounding. Death and rebirth. Like forest fires, some level of entropy is healthy and necessary for the system to work. But virtue, at least as the Stoics see it, is all or nothing. How does this fit in with a system that demands balance?
2) Nassim Taleb reveals that the ultimate test of fragility is time. So, when we look at ecosystems that have existed for millennia we must recognize that something about them is working in survival terms, whether we understand it or not. You mentioned this writing about rainforests. But I would qualify modern human interference with natural processes in the form of parking lots, genetic engineering, chemical engineering, and energy consumption at data center levels is of a different kind that terraforming the land. I think it is unnatural and unethical. And my basis for saying that is that it is intervention in a complex system (nature) that is totally untested by time. We have no conception of the higher order effects of these actions and, in fact, can articulate a good deal of harm to systems that have worked for extremely long periods of time.
Thanks again and I’d love to hear your thoughts!
Hey Erik.
Good questions. I hope my answers are not too rambling.
Question 1
The 2nd law of thermodynamics and observations made by astronomers/physicists agree that the universe is moving toward greater entropy across its vastness. Like 99% or more of it. But in the parts undergoing entropic decay, there is a transfer of energy to a far smaller number of increasingly ordered parts. In localized, open systems—areas that can exchange energy and matter with their surroundings—entropy can drastically decrease, leading to an increase in order, complexity, and structure. For a small pocket of the universe to become more ordered, it must actively export disorder to its greater environment (the Universe as a whole)
It’s true that in a closed system (the universe) it is necessary for entropy to exist. And as a whole, it will get more disordered. But in a open system like Earth, there is no absolute need for the system to maintain an entropy balance point. If we add more order, we do not have to “suffer” and have more disorder (here on Earth).
Earth receives high-quality, low-entropy energy from the Sun (shortwave solar radiation). Earth uses this energy to drive wind, ocean currents, and biological life (all highly ordered systems). Earth then "dumps" its excess entropy by radiating low-quality, high-entropy thermal energy (longwave infrared radiation) back out into the cold vacuum of space.
There is a way that this is true on Earth, in the sense that various localized disorders (fire, flood) can free up nutrients and create new niches for growth.
But I’m not actually sure that on earth that, “some level of entropy is healthy and necessary for the system to work,” at least not in the long-term land degradation, desertification, complexity, harmony, pollution sense. It’s usually a result of “open loops” in human engineering, failing to use the sun’s energy to power circular, closed-loop processes on earth.
So I think, in the Stoic sense, that the Stoic isn’t trying to oppose every fire and flood, just as he isn’t trying to stop death. But on net, one can be building negentropy locally or globally or perhaps one day beyond Earth.
Question 2
Just as a conservative and a liberal can both earnestly argue that they’ve designed their tax system around justice and wisdom, but have contradictory policies, two people might seek negentropy differently. It's an absolute standard with infinitely subjective applications.
But everything Lindy today was once new. They must begin their perseverance test at some point by definition. Only time will tell if they’re disasters of fruitful and resilient. I think a lot of things going on today will fade in time. I’m not comfortable with many of them myself. That’s where the discernment comes in, which we can only utilize in the limited sphere where we have control.
As for the intervention in complex systems part, I agree there is risk. But humans been intervening in complex systems for 300,000 years, often botching it. We’ve destroyed and degraded so much. I don’t think going in with a better set of patterns and trying to set things back toward negentropy is in any way immoral, and probably of far lesser risk. Since in many cases they're already pretty degraded, there's not so much further than can fall (but hey, man is creative in its destruction, so there's always more!)
This is really good stuff and thanks for taking the time for such an in-depth reply! I see your points. Mostly related to Q2, I think I need a clearer understanding of what constitutes human negentropy. Is it tech advances and practices that specifically retain the beauty and non-destructive efficiency of natural laws and processes? If that’s the case, then I may be persuaded.
Well, negentropy as it's classically defined isn't usually concerned with whether the complexity/harmony/order/energy forms something beautiful or full of wildlife/greenery so long as it works. So a city of concrete and asphalt might work if you could somehow make it sustainable.
But what I tried to add in here by bringing in Vitruvius and the underlying resilient patterns like the golden ratio is that they all make things stronger, more utilitarian, and more beautiful. That's the piece I'm trying to bring in. That actually, negentropy works better when we rely on these natural patterns.
How exactly that plays out will be varied, but I suspect it will vector in the right direction.
Gotcha! Thanks again!