I hope to explain how a complex system can increase its complexity,
get more self-organized, and increase its information content,
despite the second law of thermodynamics.

But first, I'd like to ask you a few questions.

First, how many of you know the second law?

OK, Entropy always increases!

Arthur Stanley Eddington called it the Arrow of Time. Information is always being lost, right?

So how can any complex system grow to have more complexity and more information?

This is my work and I hope to explain it to you today.

Second question!

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

Many people think there must have been a lot!
Because it's been running down ever since the beginning of time and we still have a lot.
So how many of you think there was a lot of information at the beginning?

Third question!

Maybe the universe had exactly the same amount of information at the beginning as we have today?

The first law of thermodynamics is that energy is conserved and the total matter in the universe is perfectly conserved.

We have the same matter and energy as when the universe began. It's just been rearranged!

So maybe information itself is a conserved constant of Nature?.

How many of you like that idea?

Fourth question!

How many of you know Laplace's Demon?

Pierre Simon Laplace knew Newton's Laws of classical mechanics extremely well.

He imagined an intelligent demon who knows the positions and the velocities of every particle in the universe and the demon knows the forces on all those particles.
The demon could then know the entire past and the future of the universe.

In that case, information would be a constant of nature (plotted as the blue line below).

However, midway through the 19th century, Lord Kelvin realized that the then just discovered second law of thermodynamics requires that information could not be constant, but would be being destroyed as the entropy irreversibly increases.

The physicist Hermann Helmholtz described this as the "heat death" of the universe.
How many of you have heard of this "heat death"?

Now Kelvin’s claim of a "heat death" would be correct if the universe were a closed system.
But it's not closed. The universe is open and infinite.

My mentor at Harvard David Layzer, following a suggestion by Arthur Stanley Eddington, showed that the maximum possible entropy is increasing faster than the actual entropy, because the universe is expanding.

We can note that the universe didn't have a lot of information at the beginning. It didn't have the same information that it has today. And it didn't have much entropy at that time.
The maximum entropy for a universe that size was very small.

The difference between maximum possible entropy and the actual entropy is called negative entropy, where complex systems can form and grow in complexity.

Now Arthur Stanley Eddington's 1934 suggestion that the expansion of the universe could allow local reductions in the entropy, but only if the global entropy somewhere else was increased even more to satisfy the second law of thermodynamics.

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

The particles distribute themselves randomly in the increasing number of possible locations.

Here we note that Layzer's growth of order requires that there be multiple possibilities before one actuality.

This is just like Darwinian evolution, where there must be possible random variations in genetic information before one is actually selected for its higher reproductive success.

We'll see that this is a fundamental rule for creating new information.
There must always be multiple possibilities before an actuality.

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
fundamental 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 immaterial information needs matter to be embodied physically and energy
to be communicated, for scientists to be able to observe and measure that information!

All the objects in the universe are concrete material information structures, composed of matter and energy components, the quarks, gluons, electrons, and photons present at the origin. Neutral atoms like hydrogen were not stable until the universe cooled to the current surface temperature of the Sun (about 6000K), 380 thousand years after the origin. At the present time, the universe has cooled down to 2.7K, the temperature of the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB).

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 forces as 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 it's the top-down communication of biological information that controls those flows!

This communication capability emerges with the appearance of life.

As we've seen, to increase the complexity of any system, including the universe, it must generate or incorporate new information - "negative entropy."

The quantum physicist Erwin Schrödinger famously argued in his 1944 article "What Is Life?" that life feeds on negative entropy.”

I'd 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, which I believe Eddington, Layzer, and I have solved.

Also in that 1944 "What Is Life" article, Schrödinger explained how genetic information could be stored in the atomic structure of a long molecule or "periodic crystal." That molecule was found to be DNA just nine years later by James Watson and Francis Crick in 1953.

And just three years before information in the genetic code was discovered, Claude Shannon formulated his theory of the communication 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. If only one message, no new information. With eight possible messages, one actual message communicates three bits of information (2³ = 8).

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

If there is only one possible message, so no new information, it's the same as with Layzer's growth of order, there must always be multiple possibilities before an actuality.

In the 1970’s I was inspired again by Arthur Stanley Eddington. He suggested Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle put a “chink” in physical determinism, making room for free will.

I developed what I called a “two-stage model” of free will. The first stage produces alternative possibilities, generated by Eddington's quantum indeterminism "chink."

The second stage makes adequately determined decisions or choices, because the quantum randomness is averaged over in large-scale brain processes.

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

I call it the Cosmic Creation Process.

It starts with Arthur Eddington and David Layzer’s insights into the growth of order in the universe. But it depends critically on the chance generation of possibilities.

We now know that the only ontologically indeterministic chance is quantum chance.
And I've shown that Einstein discovered this ontological chance in 1916,
ten years before Werner Heisenberg's quantum uncertainty principle.

I'd like to call this Einstein's Discovery of Quantum Chance.

I claim that a two-step or two-stage temporal process - first chance possibilities, followed by selection of one actuality - is the essence of the cosmic creation process. And I've found it can explain many great problems in science and in philosophy.

We've discussed three such two-stage processes. They include

1) Claude Shannon's theory of the communication of information also involves these two steps or stages (the Shannon principle). The amount of information communicated depends on the number of possible messages.

2) The two-stage model of freedom of the human will, first random alternative possibilities followed by an adequately determined practical or moral choice to make one actual.

3) The two-step process of biological evolution, chance variations or mutations in the genetic code followed by natural selection of those with greater reproductive success.

The evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr made this clear 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 two steps to create something new

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

And we can add a fourth process that is essential to the advance of knowledge.
That process is what Einstein called the “free creations of the human mind.”
This is how scientists and philosophers create new ideas!

Finally, Complex Adaptive Systems and the Cosmic Creation Process

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.

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, autocatalytic or autopoetic processes use top-down causation to control or constrain lower level processes. But this downward causation is not sending and receiving information signals, because the Benard cell is not alive.

Purpose and Values and Meanings all emerge in the universe, but only after Life appears.

Reductionism can not explain this Emergence with physical "bottom-up" forces.