IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - March 2022 - 83

creation of order out of disorder. In our human world,
this could be interpreted as the solving of problems.
Gravity as intelligence
In his article, " On the origin of gravity and the
laws of Newton, " physicist, Erik Verlinde, linked
both the existence of gravity and Newton's laws to
the maximizing of entropy.
As Verlinde puts it:
[T]he central notion needed to derive gravity is
information. More precisely, it is the amount of
information associated with matter and its location...measured
in terms of entropy. Changes in
this entropy when matter is displaced lead to an
entropic force, which...takes the form of gravity.
Its origin therefore lies in the tendency...to maximize
its entropy [7]-[9].1
Based on Wissner-Gross's tie-in of intelligence to
causal entropic force, one can tie Verlinde's theory
to intelligence lying at the core of how the universe
works. The very existence of the universal attractive
force of gravity2 can be seen as the means by which
entropy can be maximized. Gravity gathers vast gas
clouds into concentrated spheres and squeezes the
gas to the millions of degrees needed to initiate fusion
and the subsequent release of potent, transformable
low-entropy energy as photons of light. In doing this,
the resulting star irreversibly consumes its mainly
hydrogen fuel that eventually leads to its death. The
entropy produced by fusion compensates its shrinking
in Wissner-Gross's definition of intelligence. If a star has
a solar system, and a planet finds itself in the so-called,
" Goldilocks zone " -not too hot/not too cold, not to
big/not too small, not too close/not too far from its star,
axis tilted enough but not too much,...-with the right
kinds and proportions of elements, it could be ripe for
the evolution of life as another means for maximizing
future freedom of action coupled to the most efficient
production of entropy over time.
Entropy as the self-similarity of
self-similarities
Self-similarity, as cosmologist Robert L. Oldershaw
proposes in " Nature adores self-similarity, " applies up
1Verlinde's claim of gravity as an emergent entropic force is questioned by physicist,
Shan Gao, in his article, " Is gravity an entropic force? " Whether Verlinde's theory is
correct does not negate gravity's role in the formation of stars that maximize future
freedom of action.
2Though Einstein's general relativity links the warping of spacetime in the presence
of matter to gravity, evolving intelligence, as Wissner-Gross defined it, enabled by the
formation of stars, also does not change.
and down the scales, including the biological and
ecological evolutions of life.3 The branch resembles
the tree, the stem, the branch, and the tree. The veins
in the leaves resemble river tributaries, resemble the
branching of the circulatory system, and resemble
the branching of nerves. The self-similar architecture
inside our lungs allows us to breathe. " Without self-similarity
the Earth would be devoid of vegetation. " A
familiar example is " a regular cauliflower [which, like
a Matryoshka doll,] often displays self-similarity in at
least seven fractal scales " of spirals nested within spirals
[10]. Without self-similar architecture, we could
not digest food; but that would not matter because
there would be no food and we would not exist [11].
Though the scope of ways in which we, that is
all of life, share self-similar patterns are vast, there
is one pattern, however, pulling the strings backstage
of all self-similarities: the second law of thermodynamics.
In " Life, gravity and the second law
of
thermodynamics, "
Australian
astrophysicists,
Charles H. Lineweaver and Chas A. Egan, claim
that entropy " is the unifying concept of life because
the second law is universal; it applies to everything.
Man, [woman], machine, microbe, or the entire
cosmos-there is no scale or material to which the
second law does not apply " [12], including black
holes. " As physicist, Carlo Rovelli, puts it in The
Order of Time, " It is entropy, not energy, that drives
the world " [13], [14].
With respect to the emergence of, or better to,
the continued evolution of intelligence as the maximization
of future freedom of action, the love of
self-similarity throughout the universe, though seemingly
abstract and remote from our everyday affairs,
in fact bears on our current and future engagement
with exponentially advancing technology, especially
its state-of-the-art line of attack, AI and its machine
learning/deep learning, genetic/evolutionary programming,
artificial neural networks (ANNs), selfaware,
self-improving software, robotics...spinoffs.
In his book, Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence
and the End of the Human Era, author and
documentary filmmaker, James Barrat, cites the
computational neuroscience research of Dartmouth
(where AI first got its name in 1956) neuroscientist,
Dr. Richard Granger. Though the term is not
3Oldershaw cites nearly 80 examples of self-similarity, from the clustering and
super-clustering of galaxies to the base pair occurrences in DNA, the self-similarity
of clouds, lightning bolts, designs on shells, surfaces of cancer cells, species
distributions or abundances, turbulence in the oceans, design in social systems, the
internet, the drip paintings of Jackson Pollack, the fractal Mandelbrot set, the music
of J. S. Bach, and even the equations of Einstein's general relativity.
March 2022
83
IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - March 2022

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