Entropic Certainty

Entropic Certainty is an extremely high level of certainty or "the most certain uncertainty can get."

Entropy

The Second Law of Thermodynamics is one of the most concrete and reliable principles in nature, yet it is not absolutely guaranteed in every case. It states that in a closed system, entropy tends to increase over time. This is not a rigid rule, but rather a statistical inevitability.

Strictly speaking, it’s not impossible for entropy to decrease in a closed system; it’s just so overwhelmingly unlikely especially in macroscopic systems that we treat it as a fundamental law.

In small systems, entropy might fluctuate briefly, but even there, the chances of a consistent decrease in entropy are astronomically low. As the system gets larger, the probability of such a decrease trends towards zero. Why?

Well in short, there are absurdly more ways that a system can be "disordered" than "ordered."

Breaking an Egg

For a visual example, imagine dropping an egg and watching it's shell shatter, contents erupt, and a mess be made. There are an incredible number of possible messes you can get from dropping an egg.

Most of those messy outcomes look more or less similar - a splatter here instead of there - but they are all distinct disordered states nonetheless.

In contrast, how mind-mindbogglingly rare would it be to see an egg unbreak? Can you imagine tossing the yolk, whites, and shattered shell into the air and watching the egg magically leap back together, reassembling perfectly into its original form?

You know such a result is unfathomably unlikely, yet all you need to do is reverse a video of the egg breaking to see this happen. If you could somehow reverse the physics of what occurred when the egg broke, you would get to witness it unbreak in person.

So, while the unbreaking of the egg is technically possible, for all practical purposes, it might as well be impossible. This certainty is what is called Entropic Certainty: something so outrageously and overwhelmingly likely (or unlikely) that it might as well be a certainty.

Is Nothing Certain?

One could argue that even what we believe to be 100% certain is actually just another instance of Entropic Certainty. That is, anything that has always been correct isn’t guaranteed to remain correct; it’s simply never been proven wrong: yet.

We might estimate, based on its long-standing and consistent efficacy, that there’s a 99.999… (repeating to a googolplex) percent chance our assertion is true.

Nevertheless, one can never fully rule out the possibility (however remote) that our results are not merely the product of a miraculous string of lucky outcomes, fooling us into believing something is true when, in fact, it’s not.

This isn’t even accounting for the dark horse possibilities (again, however unlikely) that we are contending with an all-powerful trickster, like Descartes’ demon, or that our reality is unfolding within a simulation specifically designed to obscure the truth.

This is not an endorsement of radical skepticism, but rather a necessary perspective as we approach the nature of truth. One should approach topics with the understanding that the highest level of confidence one can hope to attain isn't certainty but rather Entropic Certainty; as close to certain as uncertainty allows.

Probabilistic Sum

Entropic Certainty is itself fundamentally an array of probabilities. Consider the Second Law of Thermodynamics: the truth of what will happen to a closed system’s entropy can be expressed as two probabilities:

• A near-100% chance that entropy will increase,
• A near-0% chance that entropy will decrease.

Therefore, all truths we can possibly access, even those we trust most fervently, are intrinsically some combination of probabilities.

See Also

 ➤ Infinite Journey: Verum Ex Logica

 ➤ Wikipedia: Second Law of Thermodynamics, Entropy, Radical Skepticism