Behavioral Thermodynamics Part 1: Beyond the 4th Law? (Essay)
This essay is adapted from my most recent Frankly video titled, Human Behavioral Thermodynamics Part 1: Beyond the 4th Law? In the future, we’ll be adapting/updating more Frankly videos (current and historic) to written versions and posting them on Substack, so stay tuned for more.
We tend to think of the laws of thermodynamics (if we think of them at all outside of high school physics class) as something distant and mechanical. Esoteric rules that govern heat, entropy, and engines – irrelevant to our everyday lives. But the more you look at them, the more thermodynamics reveals about everything: life, society, and especially human behavior.
Thermodynamic Principles
Let’s begin with a quick review of the foundations that the thermodynamic laws rest on:
Energy is the capacity to do work, often measured in units like calories or watt-hours.
Power is energy per unit of time, measuring how fast we do things and typically described through watts.
Net energy, or energy return on investment (EROI), is what remains after energy is expended to gain more energy. It’s net energy, not gross energy, that powers everything else in society.
Now to review the laws of thermodynamics themselves. First, there’s an obscure zeroth law, which simply states that systems can reach thermal equilibrium, and that temperature is a shared meaningful property of the universe. Profound, but also trivial in our case.
The first law of thermodynamics tells us that energy is neither created nor destroyed, it only changes form. Every time you turn on a light switch, flex a muscle, take a breath of air, or even have a thought, an energy transformation occurs. You may have learned this through food webs or food pyramids in biology, where energy is transformed as it converges from sunlight and soil up to plants, insects, insectivores, herbivores, carnivores, top carnivores, and eventually people – and when we die, the energy remaining in our bodies gets decomposed and transformed too.
Similarly, when we drive our car, a portion of the burned gasoline is converted into power that moves the 3,000-pound vehicle. The rest enters the atmosphere as waste heat, eventually making its way to space. The amount of energy in the universe at that moment is the same as ten minutes earlier, but now a lesser amount is useful energy. This useful energy is called exergy.
This leads us to the second law, often called the “entropy law,” which states that with every transformation, energy spreads out and entropy increases. Entropy, perhaps better termed energy degradation, increases whenever energy changes form. Useful exergy degrades into waste heat, which is why a lightbulb is hot to the touch when it’s left on. In fact, the degradation of energy is the great current of time itself, and is the reason things decay, stars burn out, and all structures eventually dissolve. The amount of time we have is the amount of energy we have.
The third law is another fairly esoteric one: it’s about what happens at absolute zero Kelvin (-273°C) when all motion stops. This is mostly theoretical, because nothing in our universe actually reaches that temperature or stillness. But it tells us that, although the universe could hypothetically approach total order, it will never achieve it because it coincides with a state of no entropy and no energy transformations.
Gradients and Work
These initial laws are the basics of thermodynamics. For a long time, this is where the story ended: three laws that describe a universe running down, cooling off, and dissipating energy over deep time. But then, biologists and ecologists noticed something more. Instead of just running down the hill of energy degradation and chaos, life seemed to build complexity and increase organization. Somehow, against this vast and universal tide of entropy, living systems create islands of order – what Erwin Schrödinger called negative entropy (later shortened to negentropy).
Think of life as riding gradients: from hot to cold temperature, from high to low elevation, or from charged to uncharged chemical state. By gradient, I mean a usable difference in heat, height, charge, or concentration that drives a flow that can be harnessed for work. This is akin to a car that’s able to coast down a hill with no extra energy expended, all because of the elevation change between the top and bottom of the hill. Astute readers will recognize these as potential and kinetic energy states.
Gradients create direction and pressure – describing where things tend to move and how strongly they move, respectively. When a system couples itself to a gradient and allows flow, it can do work. Thermodynamics explains that these gradients flatten over time due to entropy, yet living systems maintain the angle by replenishing energy from gradients in the environment (sunlight, chemical bonds in fuel, the pressure of water held back by a dam, etc).
We know these things contain energy, but how do living systems access this energy? They do so by building structures that capture more energy from the same source, or additional sources, resulting in a positive feedback loop.
The Maximum Power Principle
This self-organizing nature of systems leads us to a central point of this Frankly: what some call the fourth law of thermodynamics, often called the maximum power principle.
The fourth law, so called by systems ecologist Howard Odum (who was my PhD advisor’s PhD advisor), says that systems, living or not, organize themselves to capture and use energy as rapidly as possible to do work. That work is defined by the organism or system: a tree fanning out its leaves to catch more sun, a river braiding into channels that move more water downhill, a city or server farm rearranging to route fuel, electrons, and human attention at higher rates. The maximum power principle says that if energy is available, systems will self-organize to use it.
When there’s a usable gradient and positive feedback loops, whatever designs, behaviors, and structures pull the most useful power tend to out-compete their alternatives. In Tanzania, a cheetah runs fast because natural selection over millions of generations shaped it to extract maximum energy from the sun, via the grass, into the gazelle, into muscle.
A financial system, social network, or even our technologies follow the same rule. They emerge to capture and use things more quickly, completely, and at the maximum rate possible: energy gradients, fossil fuels, electricity, and even our attention and focus. Living systems don’t resist entropy, the second law: we ride it, like a surfer does a wave. We create temporary pockets of order by accelerating the energy flow through ourselves, both as humans and as a global economic system.
That’s the fourth law in a nutshell: successful competing systems evolve to maximize power – to find the sweet spot of as much energy as quickly as possible.
However, there’s a glaring problem with this. In a finite world accessing maximum power can, at certain times, imply less power available later. Fossil energy has given us explosive growth, but is also finite and destabilizes the climate that sustains their continued use. Sometimes, like now, the very success of energy capture becomes the seed of an organism’s or a species’ undoing.
So here’s the question I want to begin to explore: If life self-organizes to maximize energy flow, and we – as homo sapiens – figured this out, is there any chance we can recognize and bend this rule? Can conscious, self-aware creatures (us) introduce a “fifth law” of thermodynamics?
Future Security Over Short-Term Gains
Imagine a system that maximizes not instant power, but power through time. A system that optimizes for something like endurance. In other words, a principle of maximum sustained power, which implies that the power in question would be at some level that can be sustained.
When we understand that we are part of a larger energy system where our bodies, societies, and technologies are channels for ancient and current solar flows, we (at least theoretically) gain the capacity to modulate it – to find a new sweet spot. You could think of it as applying a time dimension to the fourth law, where self-awareness allows a system to choose slower, steadier flows (i.e. reduces the gradient slope) and thereby extends the gradient. Intelligence and wisdom cannot escape thermodynamics, but they might tweak it.
That’s the essence of what I’m labeling, for the purposes of this post, the fifth “law:” the idea that a species with self-awareness and wisdom can shape the flow of energy through time. This idea is hardly a new law of physics – in fact, it’s not really a law at all, just a possibility. It’s a suggestion that awareness and wisdom could become part of a feedback loop in the great thermodynamic story.
By awareness, I mean awareness of the fact that we are all animated stardust on a long journey of self-discovery, and now, within this Substack post and other communications like it, we are the universe observing and understanding itself. By wisdom, I mean the desire and foresight to do something about the human predicament.
Intelligence Doesn’t Guarantee Wisdom
In order to better illustrate the relationship between intelligence and wisdom, we can look to the classic first-contact science fiction novel by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, titled The Mote in God’s Eye. In this book, humanity encounters an alien species called the Moties, who are technologically brilliant, biologically complex, and socially sophisticated. The central discovery is that Motie biology drives unchecked population growth – their species repeatedly expands until it exhausts resources, collapses into catastrophe, and then rebuilds again.
The Moties understand this trap better than anyone. They’ve developed extraordinary intelligence, specialization, and technology to manage it, but they cannot escape it. Their biology makes restraint impossible at the species level. As a result, they deliberately isolate themselves from the wider galaxy to avoid spreading this destructive cycle to others.
The core theme is that intelligence does not guarantee wisdom, and that growth without limits leads to inevitable collapse. The novel asks whether any species – human or alien – can escape the logic of expansion once it’s embedded in biology and incentives. It is essentially a story about evolution, limits, and whether self-awareness is enough to override deep structural drivers. I find it to be a good parable for Earth’s ‘Moties.’
So, if the fourth law describes how systems emerge to capture power, the “fifth law” would describe how awareness evolves to sustain it – potentially overcoming the trap described in The Mote in God’s Eye. Life, in that sense, may be the universe experimenting with balance, trying to find the sweet spot between too little flow and too much, between stagnation and burnout.
When we talk about sustainability, wisdom, or civilization, we’re not just referring to ethics or policy, but physics and biology – and how we can work with them, rather than against. How could the physics of awareness help us to steer energy?
Maximum Power and Efficiency
There are many nuances, caveats, and sidebars that come along with these concepts. The first is that maximum power principle suggests nature doesn’t optimize for maximum energy or efficiency, it optimizes for something in between: power.
The Carbon Pulse didn’t just provide energy. It aligned perfectly with maximum power principle’s bias for rate – and we can see it directly reflected in our human economies around the world today. Fossil hydrocarbons consist of chemical energy bonds that are controllable in time and on demand. It wasn’t only their abundance, but also their access that made fossil hydrocarbons the default champion of maximum power. They allowed us to untether from the flow-based restrictions under which all life evolved to this point.
Nature doesn’t try to conserve energy. It tries to use it effectively to “maximize” the work. This implies that some of our popular obsessions with efficiency as the answer to global constraints are accurate with respect to physics but ecologically and behaviorally naïve. This is perhaps part of the reason why, since 1990, we’ve increased our global efficiency by 36%, but increased our energy consumption by 63% – almost double the efficiency gains. If power has been evolutionarily selected for, then waste has also been evolutionarily selected for.
Making Smart Plays
Another caveat is that the maximum power principle isn’t necessarily a law, like many people suggest. A law is something that always happens. While the maximum power principle does show up in many systems, it’s more of a probable outcome than a law. It's often an optimal competitive strategy – creating a collective maximum power principle – but it is not necessarily an optimal survival strategy for individual species.
For instance, estimates suggest that bacteria living deep in rock may make up 20% or more of all life on Earth. Are these bacteria doing the maximum power principle, or something else? Some of the most successful species are sessile, like coral or barnacles. Others are cryptobiotic, dropping their metabolism close to zero under certain conditions. It’s even possible that life itself, even all Earth-life, originated on Venus or Mars, and survives only because of the resilient dormancy and pan-spermia within the solar system, while all the high-throughput maximum power principle species on those planets went extinct. It’s possible.
The point is that power alone misses a crucial concept, what I would call “move quality.” Power gives you more game moves in the game of life. But those moves could be clumsy or, on the flip side, masterful. There are spiders with very negligible metabolism that prey on birds with enormous power throughput. Think of the quality of the game move of a rattlesnake: low power, high effectiveness.
Power matters. You need it to play the game. But after a certain point, it mainly buys you more turns. I’m suggesting that better turns, in many circumstances, might be more important than more turns. This is where the fifth “law” fits – it aligns with the non-inevitability of the fourth law. We can imagine systems evolving around survival, rather than throughput. Over long time scales, evolution could favor such high quality moves where raw power ceases to dominate the board.
Kardashev’s Scale
Some of you might think this all rhymes with Kardashev’s civilizational scale, which ranks civilizations by how much power they can tap: Type One for planets, Type Two for stars, and Type Three for galaxies. These concepts do rhyme in the sense of long-term civilizational aspirations, but Kardashev’s scale is about energy quantity, while the fifth “law” is closer to a stewardship rule: watts through time with some semblance of stability.
A wise species may choose not to climb the ladder, if the ladder is ultimately leading them off a cliff. It could be that truly successful species do not build Dyson spheres in space. Conscious species that survive for hundreds of millions of years would likely choose stability over maximal power, simply because that’s how you would persist that long.
Kardashev thinking has no behavior in it. It’s agnostic about psychology, governance, and culture – it’s all about power. The fifth “law” premise is explicitly behavioral thermodynamics, and asks whether norms, foresight, and self-regulation might modulate flow.
As an aside, I think the Kardashev scale is BS. It’s about the huge misnomer that tech is the universal benchmark for intelligence, worthiness, and the ultimate coin in a universe where maximum power always overwhelms wisdom.
Human Behavioral Thermodynamics
As I’ve outlined, thermodynamics operates at planetary and global economic scales. It also operates at the level of the individual human. Your brain makes up about 2% of your body weight, but uses roughly 20% of your resting energy. Neurons burn glucose and oxygen to make ATP, which fuels the movement of charged particles across membranes. That’s how thought and action happen.
Gradients are usually discussed in ecology and biophysics, but humans are also each a metabolic gradient. We live and act within behavioral gradients: boredom to stimulation, uncertainty to certainty, and low status to higher status. We move towards opportunities that promise higher energetic return for effort. We seek tools, habits, and technologies that let us do more things faster, and with less friction.
When millions or billions of humans interact, those individual gradients couple together. What emerges is something larger than any person: a metabolic superorganism. Self-organizing, physical structures whose primary function is to increase the rate at which energy, materials, and information flow through the system – cities, markets, supply chains, financial systems, and media platforms.
This human, metabolic superorganism has existed for thousands of years. But only recently has it been shaped by something new: the mother of all gradients – the Carbon Pulse. This one-time, rapid extraction and combustion of hundreds of millions of years of stored sunlight over just a few centuries, has resulted in unprecedented power across individual and societal scales. This pulse has subsidized new behavioral gradients: status tied to throughput, attention harvested by always-on platforms, and convenience as a default right.
Once this pulse was unleashed, something like the world we see today was inevitable, in my opinion. Self-organizing systems are not intentional, they emerge in a complex, multi-scaled selection process among other possible system designs. The current prevailing systems are those that fit the maximum power principle.
From this perspective, capitalism looks less like an ideology and more like an emergent thermodynamic behavior. It’s the collective expression of the maximum power principle acting through human culture. Capital flows towards activities that accelerate throughput. Firms that move energy, matter, or attention faster tend to outcompete those that do not. Financial profit, in this framing, is a signal pointing to where power density is increasing. Financial losses mark places where gradients are being accessed too slowly or inefficiently.
That’s why capitalism relentlessly expands into new domains: fossil fuels, electricity, data, and human attention. Each new gradient becomes a new arena for power maximization; AI is one of these new domains – for better or worse. The system doesn’t ask whether this is wise, it merely responds to existing gradients and feedbacks.
Seen this way, many of our social and ecological crises are not moral failures. They’re thermodynamic overshoots. The economic superorganism discovered extraordinarily steep gradients, and organized itself to exploit them rapidly. Global heating and species loss is what this all looks like on a planetary scale.
Awareness as an Antidote
So where does all of this leave us? The maximum power principle appears to be a deep tendency of complex systems. When gradients exist and feedbacks allow it, systems evolve to maximize throughput. Humans didn’t invent this rule, we’re merely expressing it. But, unlike rivers, forests, or cheetahs, we are aware of the rule at the same time we’re participating in it. That awareness may matter, or may not. I choose to believe it may.
The question here is not whether thermodynamics can be broken. It can’t. The question is whether consciousness can alter which outcomes are selected within the pure thermodynamic constraints. This hypothetical fifth “law” is not a guarantee, it’s an aspiration and possibility that a self-aware species can prioritize sustained power over maximal power.
If such a principle can emerge anywhere, it would emerge in a species that understands energy, entropy, and its own role in the flow. A species that can model the future and choose restraint without stagnation. Whether humanity can do this, or some subset of it, remains an open question.
The universe runs on energy transformation. Through us, it experiments with reflection and perhaps, with enough understanding, endurance instead of power.
Until next time, enjoy the seasonal gradients all around you – or at least notice them.
Thanks for reading.
Want to Learn More?
This essay is adapted from my most recent Frankly video titled, Human Behavioral Thermodynamics Part 1: Beyond the 4th Law? In the future, we’ll be adapting/updating more Frankly videos (current and historic) to written versions and posting them on Substack, so stay tuned for more.
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I really like the way you articulate your ideas Nate. You have a knack for communicating very detailed and sometimes complicated reasoning in accessible ways without dumbing down the important bits. I am also delighted to learn that you are going to be presenting some of your Frankly video content in written form. I may be in the minority on this but I get much more out of written work than I do from the spoken word unless I am in a direct conversation with someone. When reading I can control the pace at which I try to absorb the material and can more easily focus on and review concepts that are more difficult for me to process or that are new to me. Thank you. On the topic of using our awareness of the predicament we find ourselves in to try to ride the energy wave for longer than our evolutionary history seems to have condemned us I too choose to believe that it is possible (hopefully without being overly naive about our chances). Making that choice, I think, is an essential first step to it ever becoming a reality. I say often to my children, and anyone else that will listen to my rantings: what better purpose can we put the incredible thing that is our mind to than to try to find a path for a mind, not mine or yours in particular but a conscious awareness, to exist for as long as the reality of entropy will allow? Your ideas help illuminate the simple fact that serving that purpose implies the need for deliberately exercising self restraint and nurturing of the concept of sufficiency now. I know this is hard and often frustrating work but please keep at it. You do make a positive difference in the world.
Thank you, Nate, for taking the time to write and illustrate your Frankly. I listen to the podcast while doing rote tasks, like washing dishes. When a podcast impresses me, I watch it on youtube, pausing frequently to take notes. Your substack writing frees me from so much note taking. This posting is especially interesting to me. I love how you connect the dots of the different scales of holons in the complex system of the universe. Have you read Notes On Complexity by Neil Theise? He makes analogous connections, showing the symmetries as you increase and decrease scale, and builds a suggestion that consciousness is a fundamental Thing in the universe, not an emergent property of complexity. I wouldn't call his suggestion a hypothesis, because I see no way to test it. Perhaps the emergent property is one of *expression* of this fundamental consciousness Thing. Maybe not a Thing so much as a Dynamic. Thanks and thanks again for all you are doing in the world. Your work is life changing for me. Oh, and hope your knee surgery went well.