We have twenty minutes to explain how a complex system can increase its complexity, get more complicated, get more organized, and increase its information content.

First, I need to ask you all a couple of questions. I assume you all know the second law of thermodynamics. Entropy always increases!. Disorder increases. Everyone OK with that? It's called the Arrow of Time. Information is always being lost, right?

OK, We have an enormous amount of information in the world today. Ten major companies in the US are investing billions of dollars to put all our knowledge in their new AI data centers! (Half of all US business investment os going into AI.) And this info is not counting all the biological information, the planetary information, and the information in all the stars and 10¹¹ galaxies!

Second question!

How much information do you think there was at the origin of the universe?

Many people think there was a lot! Because it's been running down ever since the beginning of time and we still have a lot. Ludwig Boltzmann thought this.

How many of you think the universe had the exact same amount of information at the beginning as we have today? The idea is that just like energy is conserved and total matter is a perfectly conserved quantity, this idea is that information itself is a conserved constant. How many like that idea? Same information at all times!

Many organized religions think this is the case. Almighty God is omnipotent and omniscient. In-sha-allah!

My MIT colleague Seth Lloyd thinks this is the case.

He also thinks the universe is a computer! How many of you think the universe might be a computer?

How many of you think man is a machine and the mind is a computer? This is actually the most popular theory among cognitive neuroscientists today! And many AI experts too. How many of you think your mind is a computer?

But back to the information at the universe origin. How many of you know Laplace's Demon?

Laplace's demon implies that the past, the present, and the future always contain exactly the same knowledge. This makes information a constant of nature.

If we imagine this as a purely mental exercise, involving only the idea of such knowledge, we can see that Laplace's demon is a secular substitute for an omniscient God with perfect foreknowledge.

We can compare 'god-willing" in Islam ("in-sha-allah") and "everything happens for a reason" in Christianity

Now Catholics claim we have free will despite God's knowing whereas Reformation protestants following Martin Luther or John Calvin believe that everything is pre-ordained or pre-determined from the time of God's creation...

However, midway through the 19th century, Lord Kelvin (William Thomson) realized that the newly discovered second law of thermodynamics required that information could not be constant, but would be destroyed as the entropy (disorder) irreversibly increased. Hermann Helmholtz described this as the heat death of the universe.

Physicists, including Ludwig Boltzmann, described entropy as "lost information" (although many mathematicians thought the lost information might be recoverable, for example, by reversing the time).

Kelvin’s claim would be correct if the universe were a closed system. But in our open and expanding universe, David Layzer showed that the maximum possible entropy is increasing faster than the actual entropy. The difference between maximum possible entropy and the current entropy is called negative entropy, opening the possibility for complex and stable information structures.

So the current view of the universe is that it begins with a "heat birth" and ends with a "cold death."

Planets, Stars, Galaxies, and the Universe itself are all Complex Systems.
Complexity Science studies all of them. It also studies Life, but there’s a vital difference between living things and the abiotic universe.

The difference is the role of information.

The universe and its galaxies, stars, and planets are all rich in abstract immaterial information. But this immaterial information needs matter to be embodied and energy
to be communicated for scientists to observe and measure that information!

All the objects in the universe are concrete material information structures, composed of matter and energy components, from the quarks, gluons, electrons, and photons present at the origin, through the atoms, molecules, and macromolecules that could not be stable until the universe cooled to the current surface temperature of the Sun (about 6000K),
380 thousand years after the origin of the universe.

Non-living objects like atoms, molecules, planets, stars, and galaxies are passive information structures. They are entirely controlled by fundamental physical forces - the strong and weak nuclear forces, electromagnetism, and gravitation. These objects do not control themselves. They are reducible to physical causes. They are not acting. They are acted upon.

Living things, you and I, are active dynamic growing information structures, forms through which matter and energy continuously flow. And the top-down communication of biological information controls those flows!

The communication of information between living things gives rise to social structures, from slime-molds to political parties.

Single-cell, plant, and animal awareness of (i.e., communication with) information in their environment culminates in human consciousness. The storage of information in the minds of humans and their artifacts (from books to the Internet) is the sum of all knowledge.

Now the fundamental laws of thermodynamics apply to both living and non-living systems.
The second law says that entropy (disorder) must always increase, suggesting a "heat death" for the universe. It also suggests the universe must have begun with a vast amount of information. We will show how the universe began with a bare minimum of information.
And we'll explain how it avoids a "heat death"

To increase the complexity of any system, including the universe, it must generate or incorporate new information - "negative entropy." Erwin Schrödinger famously argued in his 1944 article "What Is Life?" that life “feeds on negative entropy.”

I like to call this Schrödinger's Rule: No Growth Without A Negentropy Source.

Schrödinger’s source for negative entropy was our Sun. With the bright Sun as a heat source and the dark night sky as a heat sink, the Earth is a thermodynamic engine.

But Schrödinger did not know how the Sun came to be such a source of negative entropy.

That’s a problem for cosmology. Arthur Stanley Eddington suggested in 1934 that the expansion of the universe, discovered by Edwin Hubble in 1927, could allow local reductions in the entropy, but only if the global entropy elsewhere was increased even more to satisfy the second law of thermodynamics.

I like to call this Eddington's Law: No Local Negentropy Production Without a Global Entropy Increase

David Layzer developed this idea in his 1989 book Cosmogenesis. He showed that the maximum possible entropy of the expanding universe increases much faster than the actual entropy increase. Disorder (entropy) and order (negative entropy) are simultaneously increasing in the universe. I adapted the diagrams in Layzer’s book to create this picture of his Growth of information.

See also Laplace's Demon and the Kelvin-Helmholtz "Heat Death"

Just three years before information in the genetic code was discovered, Claude Shannon formulated his theory of thecommunication of information, describing digital "bits" of information as 1's and 0's (or yes and no answers to questions). Shannon said that the amount of information communicated depends on the number of possible messages. With eight possible messages, one actual message communicates three bits of information (2³ = 8).

If there is only one possible message, there is no new information. This corresponds to the deterministic view that there is only one possible future!. Both that future and the entire past are completely pre-determined from the beginning of time, and the total information in the universe is a conserved constant, as many physicists, and some world religions, believe.

I call this Shannon's Principle: No New Information Creation Without Possibilities.

Again inspired by Arthur Stanley Eddington, who suggested in 1928 that Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle could put a “chink” in determinism, Layzer and I debated about free will.

In the 1970’s I came up with a “two-stage model” of free will, the first stage alternative possibilities, the second stage adequately determined decisions or choices. Researching the literature for years since then. I’ve now identified many philosophers and scientists who proposed the same two-stage model, well before me and after me.

See informationphilosopher.com/freedom/two-stage_models.html

I’ve since extended this two-stage model of first possibilities, then actualities to all the processes in the universe that create all new information and information structures.

I call it the cosmic creation process. It starts with Eddington and Layzer’s insight into the growth of order in the universe.

See informationphilosopher.com/introduction/creation.

The cosmic creation process also describes Darwinian evolution. Consider the evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr, in his 1988 book Toward a New Philosophy of Biology.

Evolutionary change in every generation is a two-step process: the production of genetically unique new individuals and the selection of the progenitors of the next generation. The important role of chance at the first step, the production of variability, is universally acknowledged, but the second step, natural selection, is on the whole viewed rather deterministically: Selection is a non-chance process.

Toward a New Philosophy of Biology, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988, p. 159

We now have three processes that need two stages or steps to create something new -

1. The creation of the universe itself,
2. the creation of life,
3. and human free will.

We can now add a fourth process that is essential to the advance of knowledge. That process is what Albert Einstein called “free creations of the human mind.” These are your new ideas! You cannot have them without the source of negative entropy that keeps you alive!

Finally, The Cosmic Creation Process and Complex Adaptive Systems

Now all complex adaptive systems are obviously creative. And the self-organizing autopoetic description of Umberto Maturana and Francesco Varela obviously describes them perfectly. But the “self” in a Benard cell is not communicating information to its component atoms. It has no thoughts, no intention, no goals, no purpose.

Purpose and Values and Meanings enter the universe when Life appears.

A Benard cell is a passive information structure, reducible to its components. True, it is a dissipative structure, at the edge of chaos, as Ilya Prigogine saw, but it is not alive. And finally also true, the autocatalytic process is top-down causation controlling or constraining lower level processes. But they are not alive.

These abiotic “self-organizing” systems are simply the same cosmic creation process that existed before life appeared in the universe.

I describe how the cosmic creation process does not violate the second law of thermodynamics. I'll show how the universe avoids a "heat death," without violating the second law of thermodynamics. I’ll also compare the cosmic creation process to complexity science, to complex systems, and to complex adaptive systems.

I show how this two-stage creative process helps to explain three great problems in philosophy and science. If there is time, I’ll add a fourth (Einstein) and mention two more new ideas.

1. The problem of free will and determinism.
2. Shannon’s communication of information.
3. Darwin’s theory of natural selection
4. A biological model of the mind as an Experience Recorder and Reproducer and the problem of learned representation in AI
5. The “weird” problem of quantum entanglement, which creates two “bits” of information instantly at widely separated locations

All my work is available on my website informationphilosopher.com

My personal story is here - informationphilosopher.com/about

And the ERR model is here informationphilosopher.com/mind/err/

Entanglement is discussed here - informationphilosopher.com/entanglement/common_cause/