Optimism & Melancholy

by Brant Watson

Life as a mathematical solution to Entropy

I spent a little time today on FaceBοоk. I don’t do it often but I’ve been working or overworking a lot lately and the little hit of dopamine it gave me from feeling slightly less disconnected from the world was probably useful. It didn’t take long to remember why I mostly avoid it though: I left feeling more melancholy than optimistic.

One could argue (and many do) that a melancholic or cynical perspective might be a more accurate world-view. Is a bias towards negativity really more accurate though?

I believe that in order to understand the question we’re asking one must really take a stance on the point of life itself. And to do that we’re going to take a detour down the concept of entropy.

Entropy is the tendency towards a less organized state. Your favorite mug, coffee stains and all, is an object with a great deal of order. Putting it in that state required energy to be put into the system that created it. If you knock it off the table it can quite easily break into many pieces. The odds of it getting broken eventually are high and the odds that it will un-break itself are so small that one might as well consider it zero. Likewise you might make a small fort in the sand on a beach but it will wear down and once again become disordered. While wind might blow around grains of sand randomly, the chances are incredibly small that a set of circumstances will come along and randomly produce a sand-castle.

What does this mean? Generally speaking it means that one of the fundamental laws of the universe is that it takes more energy to produce an ordered state than it does a disordered state. Proofs of this are beyond the scope of this article but if you’re really interested some of this—as well as the idea that this is fundamentally connected to the concept of time itself—is touched on in A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking.

But what then is life? Most attempts at a rigorous scientific definition of life revolve around reproduction and metabolism but I instead propose that life should be defined as a system which is capable of selectively increasing ordered states within itself or it’s own environment. In a universe in which entropy is king, life is that which harnesses disorder itself and produces a temporary state of localized order. Life explodes into existence but as soon as it exists it’s subject to the decay of entropy. It builds what it can and pushes some inertia of itself into the future if possible. Order is always a temporary affair but life solves this by being ever-changing, ever one step ahead of the disorder that pursues it. Simply put, entropy destroys all that is ordered so life must continually alter itself to avoid losing its ordered state.

Within this seemingly clinical conceptualization there is a flash of something emotional… hopeful. It also gives a framework which one can build upon for a set of ethics which is otherwise notoriously difficult to separate from relativism. It isn’t necessarily objective, but in an ocean of chaos with no naturally occurring sand-castles it is necessary to create states of order—foundations on which one may build. And that concept itself works well as a foundation.

We may not be able to fully know what we are doing or why we exist in this chaotic indifferent universe but this leaves us with the responsibility to decide for ourselves what everything means.

This means a bias towards optimism is more accurate because we are life. Angst for that which has been lost to time or history, fear of change or the unknown, a preference for any past over the present or future is the hallmark of the decay of entropy inside us. As we age and believe we become wiser, there are those who become tired. Cynical. Resistant to change. Prefer that which worked in the past. They complain about the state of things rather than building the future. They argue about the accuracy of their world views (I guess just like ole curmudgeon me is doing now).

I implore you all to instead look forward. Learn from the past but do not cling to it. Don’t assume that there are no solutions to obstacles you cannot see beyond. Avoid hubris. Don’t spend time complaining. And above all, be a builder. Put your energy into producing more order. Find things that fill you with awe and wonder; these fuel optimism. Avoid the degenerate effects of those that bring you down and avoid the easy but narcissistic egotistical need to correct the world view of others.

I genuinely believe the way to accept each moment, to love life, to experience the richness and diversity of experience which our fleeting existence has to offer, to really be alive—requires a bias towards hope.