Vita ex nihilo

In honor of E. P. Verlinde

Why order emerges amid entropy
(a physico‑Speculative-philosophical story in the spirit of emergence, holography, and entropic forces)

The escape of Münchhausen.

I have aphantasia; the apple in my head, I don’t see it. The red apple is the body and the green leaf, which catches the light, is the mind.

Silence, emptiness, Vita ex nihilo

Begin at the zero point: Vita ex nihilo, the empty precondition under which forms can appear. In music, silence is not a lack; it’s the constraint that makes rhythm and structure possible. In physics something similar lies at the bottom: the vacuum is not “nothing,” but a state with entanglement and structure. Precisely that (seemingly) empty background carries area‑law entropies and turns out to be a key to the emergence of spacetime. In the holographic formulation, entanglement, not matter, not field, but correlation, is the glue from which geometry is built: the entropy of a subsystem scales with area, not volume; in AdS/CFT that entropy is even given by the area of a minimal bulk surface (Ryu–Takayanagi). Spacetime then appears as the geometric shadow of information. (Solid in AdS; the translation to de Sitter is ongoing work.)

That pivot, from “things” to relations, makes the following thinkable: gravity is not a fundamental force, but an entropic response of the underlying information architecture. On that assumption, Verlinde showed how (under assumptions) Newton’s laws and, in the relativistic limit, the Einstein equations can be derived as the thermodynamics of information on a holographic screen. Later, in a cosmological context, he linked the dark components to an elastic/entropic memory of the de Sitter horizon. Gravity then becomes an entropy gradient, directive and testable, rather than a dogma to be taken on faith.

Entropy is real, but order is local

The second law is implacable: total entropy (system + environment) increases. Yet we see local order arise everywhere: vortex streets, cellular convection, chemical waves, living beings. Prigogine gave us the words: dissipative structures, patterns of order that exist only because they are open, push energy through, and thereby relocate and increase entropy production. Order is not a miracle against the second law; it’s a way to make entropy more efficient: local anti‑entropy at the price of a larger global increase in entropy:

ΔS(local) < 0, ΔS(total) = ΔS(local) + ΔS(environment) > 0

Life is exactly that: entropy redistribution. Schrödinger put it compactly: organisms “feed on negative entropy,” read: free energy from the environment, to maintain their internal order; that is only possible by exporting heat and disorder elsewhere. For self‑replication there are lower bounds on unavoidable heat dissipation, depending on growth, internal entropy, and durability. Replicators that dissipate better win statistically: dissipative adaptation. The arrow of life is therefore no accident, but physically probable under flux.

From entropic forces to emergent geometry

Entropic forces are not a poet’s trick; they exist in the lab (polymer elasticity, osmotic pressure). Verlinde’s move was to read them cosmically: place information on a holographic screen, assign entropy to matter positions, and let a temperature enter (Unruh/horizon). Then force ∝ temperature × entropy gradient, an entropic urge toward the most probable macro‑configurations, which in the non‑relativistic limit yields Newton and in the relativistic limit Einstein. In the late‑time (de Sitter) version there even arises an extra “elastic” term from volume‑law entropy that, on galactic scales, looks like what we call “dark matter.” You needn’t agree with every detail to see the direction: gravity as the bookkeeping of information.

That bookkeeping has a geometric translation: entanglement ↔ area (RT); network flows of bit threads ↔ max‑flow/min‑cut; entropy as the maximum number of “information streams” that can traverse the bulk, and geometry as what bounds these streams. Moral: spacetime is not made of things but of limits on information‑connection. Silence/om‑niet is then empty capacity that shapes what is allowed to connect.

The inversion: life as anti‑entropy in form, consciousness as anti‑entropy in information

  • Life = local anti‑entropy in form. It builds structural order by burning energy and exporting entropy. Resilience in motion: open feedback loops that form attractors (homeostasis), always coupled to dissipation.
  • Consciousness = local anti‑entropy in information. It doesn’t primarily order matter (metabolism) but meaning: reorganization of representations so that surprise (entropy in Shannon’s sense) falls relative to an internal model. In neuro‑speak: minimize variational free energy, predict, correct, reconfigure, a formalism for inference/control. (This by itself says nothing about phenomenal experience; extra assumptions are needed for that.)

The cost side (Landauer). Only logically irreversible steps (erasure) have a minimal heat cost Qmin⁡=kBTln⁡2Q_{\min} = k_B T \ln 2Qmin=kBTln2 per erased bit; learning contains such steps but is not identical with erasure. Real brains/algorithms typically operate far above this lower bound; kBTln⁡2k_B T \ln 2kBTln2 is a floor, not an actual energy bill. (Order of magnitude: at 310 K ≈ 3×10−213 \times 10^{-21}3×10−21 J/bit.) Making meaning therefore carries entropy price tags, but only the irreversible components pay Landauer exactly. Formally one can say: an “I” is a generator of local mutual information I(model;world)I(\text{model}; \text{world})I(model;world) that increases through acting and learning, while the necessary re‑encoding dumps heat into the environment. Life → Consciousness → Meaning thus forms an escalating anti‑entropic chain: from formative to semantic order, always local, always paid for with global entropy.
Vita ex nihilo, but not laissez‑faire: selection by constraints

  1. Vacuum/holographic constraints: area laws, entanglement entropy, entanglement wedge, RT surfaces and bit threads bound how information may connect. Geometry is the projection of those bounds.
  2. Non‑equilibrium constraints: open, driven systems develop attractors and thresholds (bifurcations) that filter behavior. Order appears where curvatures in the energy landscape are steep enough; resilience as the second derivative of potential. Prigogine’s “dissipative structures” is the sober name.
  3. Informational constraints: coding, architecture, hierarchy. The brain reduces the entropy of raw data via compression (models) and prediction (priors) and can only do so via re‑encoding, which costs energy to the extent that re‑encoding is irreversible (the Landauer component).

Vita ex nihilo is therefore not vague; it is structural capacity: empty bandwidth, empty geometry, empty degrees of freedom. No emptiness ⇒ no choice ⇒ no order.

Gravity as bookkeeper, life as launderer of entropy, consciousness as editor of surpris

  • Gravity as bookkeeper: a macroscopic effect of there being more microstates on one side of a boundary than on the other; a residual force of a universe that plays the most entropic card under holographic constraints.
  • Life as launderer: it lowers internal entropy by raising external entropy flows. Not moral, not goal‑directed; amoral physics. The sole criterion: throughput of free energy.
  • Consciousness as editor: it reorders information by deepening and refining models; it minimizes free energy (a surprisal bound) across many scales. The “I” is the stable center of that recursive edit: an attractor of self‑modeling.

In this reading, consciousness is distinct because it activates order. Life stabilizes forms; consciousness stabilizes explanations. Both are locally anti‑entropic and globally pro‑entropic.

Space from entanglement

  1. Entropic arrows (thermo): order grows where dissipative flows meet constraints, dissipative structures.
  2. Holographic arrows (information → geometry): entanglement entropy ↔ area (RT); bit threads as information streams that bound bulk geometry.
  3. Cognitive arrows (surprisal → meaning): free‑energy minimization yields model order that feeds back onto the world.

If gravity is an entropic bookkeeping of entanglement (and horizon entropy), it’s no surprise that order at higher levels, life, mind, also appears as bookkeeping: of energy and information leftovers against constraints. Same logic, different carriers.

Yardsticks and predictions

  1. The cost of meaning. Relationship between the increase in mutual information ΔI(model;world)\Delta I(\text{model}; \text{world})ΔI(model;world) and minimal heat dissipation

Q≥kBTln⁡2⋅ΔK,Q \ge k_B T \ln 2 \cdot \Delta K,Q≥kBTln2⋅ΔK,

with ΔK\Delta KΔK the effectively erased bits during learning (only logical irreversibility counts). Modest prediction: more efficient agents exhibit a systematic correlation between learning gains and energy budget; approaching the Landauer floor appears only with slow, low‑error learning. Biological brains operate well above that bound. It explains why biological systems are so energy-hungry (human brains: ~20W) while still appearing “inefficient”, they pay a thermodynamic price for redundancy, error correction, and flexibility.

It provides a testable prediction: when systems do operate close to the limit (for example, highly advanced neural networks with minimal redundancy), you would see drastic performance degradation under noise or unexpected input variation.

It suggests that AI systems approaching the Landauer limit would be extremely brittle: perfect efficiency requires perfect predictability.

  1. Dissipative adaptation. Systems under constant drive evolve toward configurations that push more energy per degree of freedom (higher entropy production) and thereby become more robust, testable in chemical networks and soft robotics.
  2. Geometry ↔ information. Changes in entanglement structure (e.g., by quenches) correspond to geometric changes (minimal surfaces, bit‑thread capacity). Experimentally approachable in quantum simulators with measurable entanglement entropy.
  3. Dark‑gravitational response (discriminators). If volume‑law entropy in a de Sitter context yields an “elastic” term, deviations from Newton/Einstein on sub‑Hubble scales should be systematically tied to baryonic distributions. Hard tests:
    • rotation curves and (weak/strong) lensing in low‑acceleration regimes;
    • cluster mass budget and time delays in lensed quasar images;
    • CMB/BAO consistency without free dark‑matter parameters.

Essentials

  • No teleology. “Anti‑entropy” does not imply purpose. It is statistics under constraints. Everything remains amoral.
  • Semantics is not Shannon. Meaning requires a model‑bearer (an agent). Without a bearer, entropy is syntax, precisely why Landauer enters as soon as you do re‑encoding.
  • Holography is not dogma. RT, bit threads, Van Raamsdonk are strong in AdS; translating to our universe (de Sitter) is ongoing work. The direction “entanglement → geometry” has traction; no more than that.

Vita ex nihilo, yet formative

What is emergent in this story is not that “order” would be a wonder against entropy. It is exactly the reverse: entropy is the machine; constraints are the moulds. In those moulds arise forms (life) and models (mind) that locally push back entropy, globally accelerate it, and thereby let meaning grow. In holographic language: silence is the empty capacity of entanglement; music is the geometry that falls out; gravity is the measure of what can connect.

Consciousness is then no ghost, but the editorial desk that squeezes predictability out of noise, a local generator of informational order in a universe that keeps correcting itself ever more richly. Vita ex nihilo is not nothing; it is the space within which something is allowed to happen. That is why, and not despite entropy, order emerges.

P.S. I claim no Truth, at most Possibility. This story would fail if: (1) dark matter is detected as a particle; (2) entanglement entropy in de Sitter does not scale with area; (3) neural learning remains fundamentally inefficient without evolutionary pressure toward Landauer; (4) the hard problem of consciousness proves irreducible. In that case, this remains a beautiful metaphor, not a physical mechanism. I offer it as a way of seeing, not as proven fact. Read my work as art. But..

Sometimes something is too beautiful not to be true.
Too true not to be true.
To be here or not to be dare.

(Stephan Konings)

Scroll to Top