Not only do lifeforms and stellar systems exist as open systems, so do cultures and social arrangements. Although they all dissipate energy and are undergoing entropy, they also are becoming increasingly complex, and increase their stored information with time.⁷

The second law implies that disorder can never spontaneously give rise to order, and it forbids entropy of a complete closed system from falling.⁸... Assuming this statement is true, as most scientists have come to believe, then there must be some opposing syntropic force. Prigogine believes entropy to be the catalyst of syntropy or increasing order and complexity.⁹... His theory of dissipative structures suggests that open systems, which include all lifeforms, are perturbed by energy fluctuations as a result of their interaction with the surrounding environment. These perturbations over time cause these systems to undergo entropy and fall apart. The chaos or disorder that results allows new interactions and recombinations, so that a system can fall together again at a higher level of order. Thus open systems continually evolve to a higher order of complexity.¹⁰

The term syntropy has been coined to imply a process opposite to that of entropy. Buckminster Fuller has been quoted to define syntropy in the following manner: "The history of man seems to demonstrate the emergence of his progressively conscious participation in theretofore spontaneous universal evolution.... My continuing philosophy is predicated...on the assumption that in dynamic counterbalance to the expanding universe of entropically increasing random disorderliness there must be a universal pattern of omnicontracting, convergent, progressive orderliness and that man is the anti-entropic reordering function....".¹¹

Szent-Gyorgyi has also stated the following about the syntropic process, which is the process by which the universe reconstitutes itself: "But there is mounting evidence for the existence of the opposite principle: Syntropy--or `negative entropy'--through the influence of which forms tend to reach higher and higher levels of organization, order and dynamic harmony.".¹²... Living matter has an inherent drive to perfect itself.

Ouspensky, interpreting Gurdjieff's works, has described the relationship of involution (entropy) and evolution (syntropy) as transformational processes. Both together comprise the "reciprocal maintenance of the universe.".¹³

I believe that this anti-entropic or syntropic process represents a property of intelligence and is under its control. Even though the universe as a whole is gaining in heat entropy, virtually all subsystems are swimming upstream against this tendency and are becoming more complex and richer in information. It may ultimately be decided that entropy is also under the control of intelligence. Intelligence might arbitrarily be divided into entropic and syntropic systems.

Information Theory

It is also essential to gain an understanding of information theory before we try to relate the evolution of intelligence to the entropic process. Even though I do not view the terms "information" and "intelligence" as synonymous, they do have some common attributes and roughly approximate each other, particularly as they relate mathematically to entropy.

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