Entropy is not the same thing as chaos. Entropy is a measure of system equilibrium. Chaos is a subjective experience of when something acts against or without regard to a normal set of conditions. Chaos is the decay of reality from expectations of an ideal.

Evil is often conflated with chaos. Whenever something bad happens, that can be taken to mean antagonism toward the affected. But this in itself is a malicious perspective. For though it intends protection toward the self, it ascribes evil to the source of damage—moreover, it ascribes a definite source, as if one entity were entirely responsible for the action, and flings its wrath against it. Sharks, snakes, spiders, wolves, lions, bears—all of these are victims of widely misappropriated blame. These creatures are not globally evil, they are locally evil, relative to the victim. Sharks are evil to seals. Wolves are evil to sheep. Lions are evil to gazelles. Yet each of these predators actually stabilizes the prey’s ecosystem by preventing them from becoming too greedy. The predator-prey, chaos-stability tension is the source of hierarchy, complexity, beauty in this world.

Entropy, which is a measure of how evenly the net energy of a system is distributed as heat, and which is always increasing in the universe, seems chaotic to an observer attempting to remain stable. But in fact, entropy is not an indicator of chaos happening, but rather is a measure of the degree to which equilibrium is being attained for a particular system. A person eating their lunch destroys the food but in so doing adds to their own stability as a highly organized entity. Chaos is used for order. Entropy of the food gives way to order for the person. With respect to the outside environment, continuing to eat food makes a person more stable as an entity, but this does not make them less entropic. It makes them more stable. The persistence of a person’s body is not negentropic. Rather, survival is the maintenance of entropy, a levelling of the rate of entropy, by means of working against the body’s tendency to crumble and equilize with its environment. Death and life are not held in the balance against each other: death and life are two balances upholding matter and energy, just as branches and roots uphold and sustain a tree. Death is not evil, it is crumbled and unchanging balance. Life is also a balance, a dynamic and topheavy balance. Life is able to remain resilient because it programs into itself the tendency to decay. The degree to which chaos is part of an organism’s being is the degree to which its species can survive. Any organism whose purposes are integrated with change cannot be ruined by change.

Maximum unity exists in a black hole, at least relative to the laws of our conventional reality in which spacetime is a continuum and time is measured by lightspeed. Entropy is greatest at the event horizon, at which point the matter and energy of stars are entirely disintegrated. This might seem like infinite chaos, but that view is conditioned by the expectation of death being evil. Black holes are actually the most stable entities in the entire universe. One cannot oppose death as raw chaos against life’s order if black holes are so unified they appear to us as a singularity. Nothing, by definition, is more organized than a singularity. One-pointed concentration. Harmony between all purposes. Death is a balance just as life is a balance. God appears just as much in the simple tranquility of death as in the extravagant beauty of life.

Maximum instability exists in the potential energy at subatomic levels. There is so much instability between matter and antimatter particles, that they are continually forming and annihilating all around us at any given moment. Subatomic particles can blink in and out of existence or travel through solid boundaries. To us who live in the scale somewhere between black holes and subatomic particles, the microscopic world appears chaotic. In the case of black holes, they appear chaotic because of the reality around them being fragmented, stretched and ripped apart by means of a unifying vortex. Differences are annihilated, leading to stability. But in the case of subatomic entities, they appear chaotic because their matter is so diverse it has not yet achieved a unity. Entropy has not come to pass enough that unity can appear. Everything is so specific when it is tiny. One could say that they have so much uniqueness that they are unstable with their environment. The balanced order of life’s hierarchy relates to the equilibrium of entropy, macrocosmic black holes. But the diversity and grandeur of life’s hierarchy relates to the specificity of potential energy, microcosmic entities. The tendency of life toward order, therefore, is not something directly entropic, but is an analog of entropy. The equilibrium of entropy is somehow replicated, its function or effect is abstracted in a different form, not as the end result of change but as a mechanism to preserve cycles of change, as an engine of renewal. Life incorporates death so that life can continue. Perhaps likewise microcosms incorporate macrocosms so microcosms can continue, perhaps instability incorporates equilibrium so that instability can remain, perhaps matter-energy incorporates space-time so that matter-energy can be ever renewed.

Macrocosms appear as continuums that tend toward entropic unity. Microcosms appear as tangled webs that begin as paradoxes. Our understanding of chronological progression places infinitely varied microcosms as the logical beginning point, tracing their changes effects outward into macrocosmic unities. Likewise, our consciousness traces data from raw, unintelligible, wildly diverse associations toward conceptualized categories. Our mind evolved to mirror the cosmos. That is why we can recreate the cosmos in our own image. We have effectively become like God. Our minds evolved to abstract the real world into informational essences that play out in the worlds of our imagination with analogous functions.

When matter is born, it begins unstable, almost as light, with a tendency to collapse into unity with its neighboring material entities. Once it has formed larger scales of unity, those little worlds emerge with their own instabilities. The process repeats until the spacetime continuum itself is dragged by itself into a singularity so singular that it is perhaps the definitive representation of nothingness. Reality fragments itself into bits and parsecs, clouds stretched to vaporization, time itself freezes. On the small hand, reality becomes light. On the big hand, reality parallels light. Transmutation of substance and emulation of behaviors both achieve the same outcome of light-likeness.

But only with respect to our conventional reality in which continuums are the norm and light is the entity upon which all norms are set. What lies on the other side of the black hole, beyond all sequence of time may be infinite velocity, or time beyond time. What lies prior to matter, prior to potential energy may be immeasurable indefiniteness, moments arranged like objects on a table, scattered all in a place contracting faster than light’s convention of time can register. Time is discovered in microscopic space, space is discovered in macroscopic time. Beauty is spontaneous, balance is spacious. Hierarchy is temporal, unity is spatial. And they can fold and unfold into each other. As we begin and end in light, we start from stardust turn to lifedust and go back again, we rise into dynamic stabilities and collapse back into dynamical functions. Light from light, light upon light. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. From God, through God, to God.


October 8th, 2020
San Luis Obispo