Entropy as a Purpose in Life

To the best of our knowledge, these tool use puzzle and social cooperation puzzle results represent the rst successful completion of such standard animal cognition tests using only a simple physical process. The remarkable spontaneous emergence of these sophisticated behaviors from such a simple physical process suggests that causal entropic forces might be used as the basis for a general—and potentially universal—thermodynamic model for adaptive behavior. Namely, adaptive behavior might emerge more generally in open thermodynamic systems as a result of physical agents acting with some or all of the systems’ degrees of freedom so as to maximize the overall diversity of accessible future paths of their worlds (causal entropic forcing). In particular, physical agents driven by causal entropic forces might be viewed from a Darwinian perspective as competing to consume future histories, just as biological replicators compete to consume instantaneous material resources [26]. In practice, such agents might estimate causal entropic forces through internal Monte Carlo sampling of future histories [13] generated from learned models of their world. Such behavior would then ensure their uniform aptitude for adaptiveness to future change due to interactions with the environment, conferring a potential survival advantage, to the extent permitted by their strength (parametrized by a causal path temperature, Tc ) and their ability to anticipate the future (parametrized by a causal time horizon, ). Consistent with this model, nontrivial behaviors were found to arise in all four example systems when (i) the characteristic energy of the forcing (k BTc ) was larger than the characteristic energy of the system’s internal dynamics (e.g., for the cart and pole example, the energy required to lift a downward-hanging pole), and (ii) the causal horizon was longer than the characteristic time scale of the system’s internal dynamics (e.g., for the cart and pole example, the time the pole would need to swing through a semicircle due to gravity).

These results have broad physical relevance. In condensed matter physics, our results suggest a novel means for driving physical systems toward self-organized criticality [27]. In particle theory, they suggest a natural generalization of entropic gravity [8]. In econophysics, they suggest a novel physical denition for wealth based on causal entropy [28,29]. In cosmology, they suggest a path entropy-based renement to current horizon entropy-based anthropic selection principles that might better cope with black hole horizons [1]. Finally, in biophysics, they suggest new physical measures for the behavioral adaptiveness and sophistication of systems ranging from biomolecular con- gurations to planetary ecosystems [2,3].

In conclusion, we have explicitly proposed a novel physical connection between adaptive behavior and entropy maximization, based on a causal generalization of entropic forces. We have examined in detail the effect of such causal entropic forces for the general case of a classical mechanical system partially connected to a heat reservoir, and for the specic cases of a variety of simple example systems. We found that some of these systems exhibited sophisticated spontaneous behaviors associated with the human ‘‘cognitive niche,’’ including tool use and social cooperation, suggesting a potentially general thermodynamic model of adaptive behavior as a nonequilibrium process in open systems.

Researchers have created an AI that self-directs itself into activities like balancing a ball on a stick or buying stocks low and selling high by simply programming it with the desire to maximize the "future histories" available to it (ie. if the ball drops or the AI runs out of money, then the possible futures are reduced to one in the simulation). This suggests a thermodynamic relationship between intelligence and disorder; that we might seek to maximize the entropy in our lives by staying alive, making money, getting educated, or otherwise increase the number of future histories available to us.