Reality is governed by entropic decay rather than perpetual renewal. Existence is fundamentally prone to fragmentation and eventual dissolution, applying to stars, microbes, cities and humans alike. The thermodynamic revolution revealed that all systems tend toward disorder, overturning metaphysical optimism about endless growth. Life nevertheless exhibits local increases in complexity, diversity and abundance through evolutionary processes and recovery after mass extinctions. Philosophical and ethical frameworks largely still assume continual flourishing, failing to account for the pervasive reality of decay. A revised metaphysics and ethics would need to acknowledge human existence as embedded within and subject to universal entropy.
Just as the full metaphysical implications of the Copernican revolution took centuries to unfold, we have yet to fully grasp the philosophical and existential consequences of entropic decay. We have yet to conceive of reality as it truly is. Instead, philosophers cling to an ancient idea of the Universe in which everything keeps growing and flourishing. According to this view, existence is good. Reality is good.
Apparently, life flourishes on Earth.Across the vast expanse of evolutionary time, living things seem to have veered toward greater complexity, diversity and abundance. Single-celled organisms gave rise to dense communities of bacteria. Trilobites evolved compound eyes with crystalline lenses of calcite. Animal brains split into two hemispheres, opening new frontiers of thought. Even after five mass extinctions swept the planet, life returned again and again, branching into countless variations of form and function in a ceaseless unfolding of renewal.
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