Negentropy is a scientific measure of complexity and order. It is the opposite of entropy, which is a measure of chaos and disorder.

The second law of thermodynamics says that the entropy of the universe is always increasing. This is why the big bang was highly ordered, and we have been trudging on a one-way path towards disorder ever since, leading to the eventual heat death of the universe, where every atom of hydrogen is near aboslute zero and is almost infinitely far from every other atom. The universe is expanding, this is where we are headed in several trillion years.

However the beauty of it is that despite the inevitable heat death of the universe, there can be local pockets of negentropy, where order takes over in a regional area. An example of this is DNA, which is able to repair itself and self-replicate. It preserves precise data over millennia.

Another example is the sun. Instead of gasses all spreading apart, gravity pulls them together and they become so dense and hot that they ignite nuclear fusion explosions by the trillions, even creating new elements due to the intense gravity in the center. The elements get sorted by density: https://helios.gsfc.nasa.gov/onion.gif

This is highly organized. This is a process of negentropy. Negentropy is the only reason we exist at all in this sea of ever-increasing entropy. It's like making a wave in a draining pool that allows the water to go higher for just a moment in a certain spot, even though the pool is still draining overall.

Every time you clean your room, you create negentropy because things take on a more ordered state than they had previously. Every time you write a song, or write an essay, or think a high-level thought, you create negentropy in your brain and in your culture. If you create a house of cards, you create negentropy. However when you knock it down, you create the same amount of entropy. And the energy used to make the card house also created entropy. So there's always a net loss.

Human culture is the billion-person effort of keeping alive our most negentropic concepts and ideas against the decay of time and entropy itself, so that we can see the universe from the highest perspective and stand on the shoulders of giants.

When two people form a relationship, with inside jokes and subtleties, this is creating an arrangement of complexity. Then when the relationship ends, it creates entropy of an equal or greater amount. It is just like a complex industrial machine that engineers spent decades designing, that is now obsolete and sits rusting, unused. Complexity that is lost.

When central banks were created, this is an arrangement of high complexity. When you have a deep conversation, even with yourself, this can be a discovery of new layers of complexity, and thus negentropy.

But always remember, when creating negentropy, thermodynamics requires expending an equal or higher amount of entropy in the process. We cannot beat entropy in the long-term. Only in the short term, in little pockets of space. Michelangelo created the beautifully detailed statue David, but he still died. However David persists. And thus so does the cultural memory of Michelangelo.

The arrangement of a computer is probably among the most negentropic creations of mankind. Along with things like rocket science, and thermodynamics. These highly organized systems of thinking and creation are so complex they were literally invisible to us until the last few hundred years. It makes a person wonder how much farther we can see. How much there is to know.

Negentropy. It is us, we are it. It is the journey. Life and consciousness itself is negentropy. The sun. Our DNA. Love. Every laugh you've ever had. World history. Not a single one would exist without negentropy.

A human being will die. Negentropy cannot be fully destroyed in our universe until the death of heat itself. Until then it can only change forms. This is why the ancient Egyptians said "Every person dies twice. Once with the death of their physical body, and again when their name is mentioned for the last time"

It seems that life is negentropy. Is it possible that negentropy is the experience of consciousness itself?