Physics and order

There are two mathematically equivalent ways of describing each physical law: either as the past causing the future, or as nature optimizing something.

Page 251, Life 3.0: Begin human in the age of artificial intelligence, Max Tegmark

[R]ecent work by my MIT colleague Jeremy England and others has brought more good news, showing that thermodynamics also endows nature with a goal more inspiring than heat death. This goal goes by the geeky name dissipation-driven adaptation, which basically means that random groups of particles strive to organize themselves so as to extract energy from their environment as efficiently as possible (“dissipation” means causing entropy to increase, typically by turning useful energy into heat, often while doing useful work in the process). For example, a bunch of molecules exposed to sunlight would over time tend to arrange themselves to get better and better at absorbing sunlight. In other words, nature appears to have a built-in goal of producing self-organizing systems that are increasingly complex and lifelike, and this goal is hardwired into the very laws of physics.

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