Autonegentropy

Author’s Note: This is a work in progress, especailly this essay in front of you. I have published this over-short essay only to lock in time, February 23, 2026, the day I coined the new word autonegentropy. I will be fleshing this out over the next week or so. Meanwhile it will stay published as I add to it.]

The Temporal Rights paradigm looks at the universe through the entropy lens and observes:

You can’t have a running-down universe without having a running universe. If the universe is running and is also made of separate parts, then those parts are doing the running. Running pieces are some kind of entities. Let’s call them operators because they existentially possess and display agency and power as seen in atoms and galaxies, for example. Their power is demonstrated in the creation and destruction of states that are sometimes stable and sometimes unstable. Stable states persist as constraints within which operators continue to operate. Within these constraints, operators establish new states, some stable and some unstable. Those that persist extend the range of possible operations. What appears as “memory” is the continued maintenance of these constraints across time. The accumulation of such maintained constraints is what we call autonegentropy.

The Challenge Ahead

This is the theory of autonegentropy, and with this publication, a new challenge is demonstrated. Is there a good observable example of this?