Integrating Biological Principles into Observational Entropy

The second law of thermodynamics is grounded in our empirical experiences in which the total entropy of a physical system must always either increase or remain constant during any spontaneous process. This notion of entropy is classically described as a measure of the randomness or uncertainty concerning a system’s state and represents the degree to which the details of the system are unknowable and therefore unavailable to be converted into an identifiable activity or useful work. This uncertainty is a result of an observer’s inability to exactly discern, know, and predict the state of the system as a condition of indeterminacy. Recently, the concepts of entropy have been reconstituted as _observational entropy_ corresponding to the observer’s lack of knowledge about the system. If the observer is to hold a central place in our modern understanding of entropy, then it is important to incorporate the biological principles for the processing of information as knowledge acquisition into the determination of these measures.