The Importance of Entropy

To describe, explain, and predict the outcome(s) of a process with any degree of accuracy may require multiple levels of language where each successive level quantifies over the predicates of the prior level- especially where natural selection is coupled with prisoner’s dilemmas and hierarchically organized communities of ‘agents’.  Nevertheless, we must not forget that the thermodynamic realities of the energy flows that implement the agents impose fundamental limitations – indeed, it is of these limitations, and nothing else, that meaningful selection pressures are born.  The failure to recognize that the validity of higher semantic, abstract, intentional levels of causal explanation (invoking for example beliefs, desires, knowledge, and choice) in no wise invalidates the principles of entropy is one source of much confusion and trouble in our present civilization.