#entrpy

Anything Cares

The apparent contradiction is only surface-deep. Life looks like fighting and striving because that is how dissipation organizes itself locally, but underneath there is no intention, no striving in the conscious sense.

Thermodynamically, every organism is a dissipative system. It maintains low entropy internally by channeling energy from its environment. “Fighting” and “striving” are simply the strategies that maximize that energy throughput in a given niche. A lion hunts, a tree grows toward the sun, bacteria swarm because all these behaviors are the statistically most effective ways for the local pattern to sustain itself long enough to replicate, not because the organisms “want” to survive.

Life is more like a chemical reaction than a volitional actor. The apparent struggle is the geometry of energy flow. It must compete, dominate, or exploit available gradients, or it collapses. That is why evolution produces behaviors that look goal-directed. But the “goals” exist only as a side-effect of physics, not as conscious striving.