Anti-Entropic Role of Information

Discussion

Akop P. Nazaretyan:

"In order to sustain a far-from-equilibrium condition, an organism must work in opposition to the environment's pressure. This work requires free energy to be extracted from other systems. So, in order to continually tap energy from outside and escape from itself becoming a source of energy for its enemies, an organism needs information: It has to orientate itself in the habitat, forecast events and organize its activity in conformity with a dynamic situation. In other words, it must construct anticipative world models. Without this purposeful and highly sensitive anti-entropy activity, neither long-term, far-from-equilibrium conditions, nor the progressive building up of stages in living matter's non-equilibrium would be possible. For its own part, competition for matter and energy resources has served as an immutable motive for the perfection of modeling procedures, so that the specific weight of information versus matter/energy has been increasing with time. It is on the social stage that the mind became more and more the determinant cause of material evolution. So, as we like to get rid of teleology, or the ‘drive to evolution’ assumption, we still have to assume living matter's drive to sustain highly improbable, farfrom-equilibrium conditions. This occurs in a manner similar to Henri Bergson's élan vital, but, in order to avoid the French philosopher's dualism, we must seek the evolutionary premises of living organisms' immanent attribute. As far as Big Historians in the West have used equilibrium patterns, they have tended to confine themselves to discussions of matter/energy interactions and underestimated the information processes. As a result, the history and prehistory of subjectivity, as well as mental and spiritual reality, are viewed as epiphenomena (side effects) of material structures that do not play a role in evolution."

(http://www.socionauki.ru/almanac/issues/evolution_2_en/full_text_nazaretyan.pdf)