The Informational Foundations of Organization in Physical and Biological Systems : Toward an Extended Thermodynamic Principle of Self-Organization

Abstract

Understanding how organized structures emerge and persist in physical and biological systems remains one of the central challenges of modern science. While classical thermodynamics successfully describes energy conservation and entropy production, it does not explicitly account for the role of information in driving organization, stability, and structure formation. In this article, I propose a unifying theoretical framework in which information is treated as a fundamental physical quantity governing organization in complex systems.

I introduce the concept of organizational efficiency, a measure capturing the balance between usable information and effective entropy, and argue that this balance determines the capacity of a system to self-organize. I demonstrate how this informational perspective naturally extends thermodynamic reasoning beyond equilibrium and provides a common language for phenomena observed in physics, biology, and artificial systems.The framework offers new insights into self-organization, robustness, and the emergence of structured behavior, and establishes conceptual foundations for an extended thermodynamic principle centered on information.