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 en-tropy, then it is important to incorporate the biological principles for the processing of information as knowledge acquisition into the determination of these measures.