ABSTRACT
We have suggested that doing purposeful productive labour typically reduces entropy. Such entropy-reducing work requires information in two forms, an action plan or capacity for behaviour, and information coming in from the senses to monitor the implementation of the action plan. Productive labour also involves work in Watt’s sense of overcoming physical resistance. As such it consumes energy and produces an entropy increase in the environment that more than compensates for the entropy reduction effected in the object of labour. We have also seen how Maxwell postulated that it should be possible to reduce the entropy of a gas if there existed a being small enough to sort molecules. In this case the being would be using information from its senses, and in its action plan, to produce an entropy reduction in the gas with no corresponding increase elsewhere.
