I have a theory about this. To me the relationship between entropy and life was a big realisation and left me wondering why it wasn’t of greater cultural or scientific interest. Here’s what I came up with:
All life is preoccupied with removing free energy in order to get greater predictability over the future, and that encompasses literally everything we do in one way or another. Therefore, the theory that life reduces local entropy is not in any way useful, because it doesn’t guide us to do anything differently than we are already doing. It’s a bit similar to the anthropic principle.
Example: let’s say you need to clean up your room. You’ll find that even doing a very quick straightening of debris on a table will make a space feel more orderly and produce some level of satisfaction. But if you’re not the type to do that regularly, you might not bother the next time because clutter is the norm and it’s more dependable.
Another example: tell a businessman that life is a process which reduces entropy locally. Ok, so he has to get greater predictability over his circumstances, how to do that? More money and power. That was already taking place.
Thus, this theory hasn’t really taken off for lack of utility.
When we have a magical entropy measuring device, then yes, we can use it for all sorts of things...
I had similar thought, which led me to believe that the closest thing to God is the irreducible quantum randomness in our molecules.
In fact, I believe that life is not exclusively about order, but rather about harnessing randomness (entropy by another name) and capturing its output to bootstrap solutions to environmental problems. Our entire manner of reproduction is about allowing just enough randomness to produce interesting new results while maintaining the integrity of the life-form.
I’m a cryptographer, by the way, so what got me thinking about this was how we put a nice box around randomness to produce cool stuff like encryption and signature schemes.
That sounds similar to what I arrived to when I became somewhat obsessed with the topic yet admittedly lacking much knowledge about it. Lookup hormesis (basically life needing some amount of chaos to keep it strong) or 10th man rule, there's some interesting correlates that I wrote about here [0]. It's all pretty interesting but being stubborn as I am, it took me a while to realize I'm better off leaving it to smarter people more versed in those topics. I eagerly await some very intelligent person who doesn't mind risking being seen as a quack to try to marry thermodynamic principles with human behavior and the like, even though it's more descriptive than prescriptive and may not tell us as much as we'd like to know. It also may be kind of existentially defeating to some as it'd necessarily prescribe deterministic views to life but some say quantum mechanics still leaves some philosophical wiggle-room for us there.
All life is preoccupied with removing free energy in order to get greater predictability over the future, and that encompasses literally everything we do in one way or another. Therefore, the theory that life reduces local entropy is not in any way useful, because it doesn’t guide us to do anything differently than we are already doing. It’s a bit similar to the anthropic principle.
Example: let’s say you need to clean up your room. You’ll find that even doing a very quick straightening of debris on a table will make a space feel more orderly and produce some level of satisfaction. But if you’re not the type to do that regularly, you might not bother the next time because clutter is the norm and it’s more dependable.
Another example: tell a businessman that life is a process which reduces entropy locally. Ok, so he has to get greater predictability over his circumstances, how to do that? More money and power. That was already taking place.
Thus, this theory hasn’t really taken off for lack of utility.
When we have a magical entropy measuring device, then yes, we can use it for all sorts of things...