The Vanishing Order: Entropy and the Understanding of Life, 1900-2025

The Vanishing Order: Entropy and the Understanding of Life, 1900-2025

Bergson tried to understand the phenomenon of life as a phenomenon of "creation and flow" that cannot be captured by the dynamic order of matter. At the center of this approach is the dialogue with "entropy. In modern science, entropy has been treated as an increase in disorder, i.e., the direction in which the system becomes more chaotic. As the second law of thermodynamics states, in a closed system, energy availability gradually diminishes and eventually diffuses to standstill. Life, however, moves in the opposite direction - it accumulates energy in one direction, maintaining its organic structure and increasing its complexity.

To explain this "retrograde" nature of life, it is necessary to consider not only the flow of energy in and out, but also the order of information and the irreversibility of time. Bergson viewed life as "a process by which the accumulation of the past is opened up toward the future. In other words, life is a "temporal being" that continues to reconstitute order within itself even in the flow of entropy.

He also pointed out that the concepts of "nothingness" (emptiness) and "negation" are misunderstood. Rather than treating the lack of information as zero, the process of life itself, which is branching and diffusing, produces "meaning" and "form" while increasing entropy. Life is not a being that resists the increase of entropy, but a being that "weaves order" using entropy as material.

This view is an insight that predates information theory, self-organization, and even complex systems science. Through concepts such as "memory" and "image," Bergson sought to understand life not as a mere flow of energy, but as a "sequence of meanings. To understand life, therefore, is to read not only its physical order and structure, but also the "time" and "traces of information" inscribed in it.

Life is a miraculous "flow" that retains its meaning and form while dissipating in the midst of entropy, and this is the basis of our existence.