Transcript for a discussion with GPT-4.1

What drives all living beings? Is there a mathematical or physical principle behind life’s actions and purpose?
After thinking deeply about value, entropy, and natural selection, we can arrive at a unifying principle:
All life maximizes “value” by minimizing entropy in its local environment.

1. What is “Value”? The Maximization Principle

• Definition: Value is whatever a living being (or agent) strives to increase—resources, information, experiences, survival chances, order, or other emotional (chemical) preference.
• All living systems act to maximize their own accumulated value over their lifetime—this can be written mathematically as:

where (V(t)) is “value” at time (t). - Alternatively, for curiosity/exploration, value can relate to accumulated knowledge ((E)), so:

• In practice, every creature is constantly seeking to increase these quantities.

2. Why is This Always True? Connection to Entropy and Natural Selection

• Value and entropy are linked: Increasing value typically means gathering useful resources/information and maintaining internal order—that is, minimizing entropy locally.
• Natural selection ensures this:
  • Only the organisms that maximize value and keep their internal/external environment ordered survive and reproduce.
  • Those who don’t—who let disorder and randomness consume them—are left behind by evolution.
• Nature selects for value-maximizers:
  • This process “filters” out any lineage or behavior that doesn’t keep internal and local entropy low enough for survival and action.
• So, maximizing value and minimizing local entropy are two sides of the same natural law for living systems.

3. Why This Holds Even Without Natural Selection: The Agency Rule

• What if there’s no “survival of the fittest”?
  Even in the absence of evolutionary competition, any active system (agent, organism, or AI) still needs to preserve internal order/structure to keep functioning.
• The very ability to “make decisions” requires organized, low-entropy mechanisms.
• Second law of thermodynamics:
  • If an agent does not act to maintain local order, its machinery (or mind) will fall apart as entropy increases, and it will cease to be an active, decision-capable system.
  • Thus, persistence itself—remaining an active system—demands ongoing reduction of local entropy.
• So, regardless of “selection,” only systems that continually act to preserve internal (and often local) order will continue to exist and operate.
• In fact, any agent or decision-making system must be designed—by nature or intent—to keep local entropy low. If it fails to do this, it cannot persist, function, or exist for long enough to make decisions at all. This necessity makes the value principle universally true for all systems capable of action.

4. Human and Animal Examples—and Counterexamples Explored

Explorers

• People who thrive on learning, travel, new experiences. Their value comes from maximizing information, novelty, and reducing their uncertainty—creating order in their minds.

Non-Explorers (“Builders,” “Maintainers”)

• People who maintain families, build infrastructure, care for environments, or perform routine jobs. They increase value by sustaining or creating order in their immediate surroundings—even if their own mental state remains unchanged.

Animals and Other Living Things

• All animals, from predators to parasites to foragers, are driven to keep their own physical order (structure, energy, reproduction) and to reduce entropy locally.
• Critically, low entropy is required not only to maintain these living systems but also for their creation in the first place—when a system is born or constructed, its creator (whether nature, evolution, or intelligent design) must assemble low-entropy elements into organized structure.
• Even non-living “active” systems (e.g., an AI designed to persist) require continuous low-entropy creation and maintenance to remain functional.

Debunking the Counterexamples

1. Self-destructive behavior, illness, or neglect

   • These aren’t the “intent” of life, but malfunctions—systems whose order-maintaining capacity, whether in the brain, genetic code, or any regulatory machinery, has broken down.

2. Chaotic play (children, animals)

   • What appears as disorder is, from the perspective of the child or animal, an active and meaningful engagement. In their minds, play is a pursuit of something great and purposeful—building skills, adaptable minds, and ultimately increasing internal order or value.

3. Exploitative/parasitic behavior

   • Parasitic systems may increase the entropy (disorder) of their host, but they are maintaining or increasing order—reducing local entropy—within themselves or their own subsystems.

4. Wasteful predation

   • Sometimes seemingly wasteful, but often an adaptive response to resource abundance, maximizing net value for the individual.

5. Breakdown cases

   • Ultimately, when genetic or neurological “machinery” fails, systems cease to maximize value and are eventually filtered out by nature.

In all cases, what can initially look like value-minimizing or entropy-increasing action is, when seen from the perspective of the agent’s own structure or needs, still value-seeking at the local scale—or simply a result of malfunction.

Conclusion

Whether through evolution, design, or the laws of physics, life is defined by its unending effort to maximize value and create or sustain local order.
This value principle must hold: any agent or decision-making system must, by necessity, preserve low local entropy in order to exist and act; otherwise, it will break down and be unable to persist.
Without this drive, agents—regardless of complexity—cannot persist as decision-makers or organized systems.
This unites explorers, builders, and all living things, with rare counterexamples explained as breakdowns, not as true contradictions to the law.
To be alive is to fight entropy locally—and in doing so, to create value.