The role of entropy in the brain/mind system
Entropy measures the disorganisation of a state. As such, on a psychological level, most people experience a low level of entropy. This very organized psychological state is needed for the individual to function correctly in every day occurrences. But this doesn’t mean that the psychological apparatus works at its optimal level. Its purpose is met… on a primal level. The individual lives, experiences emotions, stimuli, and can react to it. Saying the entropy is low (meaning the system is working) but it can translate into a wide array of behaviour. These behaviours could be very “normal” (which means devoid of any pathos), but it could also mean depression, self-harm, addiction, desire for power, women, money, pathological anger, neuroses etc…
The purpose, from the perspective of the is to manage itself as little as possible, so it can assure its own survival.
When someone begins a journey to heal his or herself, that persons take the apparent insane decision to be less effective on the exterior world, for a time, so it can allocate resources inward. Then, that person’s mind turns some of its resources towards its own betterment. When in psychotherapy, for example, the person will work at increasing the level of its own mind’s entropy. Healing oneself often goes through digging past emotional scars, and this phenomenon disrupts the previous equilibrium. This disruption is an absolute necessity if the whole brain/mind system to change and access a more harmonious state.
So, with this interpretation, it is not the fear of the unknown that scares a human brain, but the perspective of being temporarily less able to act on the physical world. And the real fear is animal part of the brain saying that we could, in fact, die, because if the system increases its level its complexity, it changes with it. But with time, self-compassion, introspection and emotional understanding, the system can gradually go back to a more organized, low entropy state.
For some people though, a state of extremely high perturbation/high entropy can be induced when exposed to traumatic experiences. In that state, the brain scrambles to make sense of what is happening to it. Anxiety arise, the past experiences continuously takes the front row of the mental functions, and the brain can spend most of the time dealing with the permanent perturbation that is the trauma.
Therefore, it is not the experience that continues to have an effect (a car accident is a fixed event, firmly rooted in a point in time), but the state that this experience has put the brain in. The extremely rapid and intense change in the individual’s psyche induce such enormous changes that the psychological apparatus might not ever recover.
It can take years, effort, and even medication, for the brain to work itself back to a low entropy state.
We could assess that the mind and the brain that created it are, in fact, systems that have the unique ability to change -or at the very least act on- their own degree of entropy. Also, whereas the theory of entropy says that the degree of complexity can only increase with time, until equilibrium is met, the human brain/mind system can work toward reducing it, in order to experience what society calls “piece of mind”.
Sadly, I am absolutely not capable of understanding high level mathematics, I can only infer on how they could be applied. With this model, how can we apply the law of entropy to the processes that take place in psychology? I would be extremely interested in seeing more research in this field.