"*That which exists persists.*" This phrase is often attributed to the 17th-century philosopher _Baruch Spinoza_, though the exact wording appears absent from his writings. Nonetheless, the sentiment captures a key aspect of his philosophy: that reality and substance are continuous, enduring through time. Flipping this phrase around, we might say: _That which does not persist, cannot exist._ This simple inversion suggests that persistence is not just a feature of reality—it is its foundation. Matter, for the most part, persists by settling into a state of equilibrium, where forces acting upon it cancel each other out. Newton’s first law describes this perfectly: an object at rest stays at rest, and an object in motion remains in motion unless acted upon by an external force. A ball rolling down a hill eventually comes to a stop when gravity’s pull is balanced by the normal force of the ground. For most of the universe’s 14-billion-year history, matter has persisted in this stable state, existing in a net-zero balance of forces. Unfortunately, this view has created the misunderstanding that matter is passive, brute, or inert—an obliging backdrop against which the real drama of life unfolds. Rocks, rivers, and rusty nails merely _are_, waiting passively for the hand of a living agent to put them to use. Jane Bennett, however, invites us to reconsider this assumption. In **_Vibrant Matter_**, she asks us to imagine matter not as a mute, inert substance but as something teeming with activity—an underground hum of agency that we have simply failed to recognise. The supposedly lifeless world, it turns out, is up to all sorts of mischief. Consider the stubborn agency of a boulder that refuses to stay put on a mountainside, hurtling instead into a valley and reshaping the landscape. Or the uncanny determinism of a river carving out a canyon over millennia, sculpting rock with a patience no human architect could match. Even metal has its moods: it rusts, warps, and conducts electricity with a logic of its own, forming alliances with oxygen, moisture, and heat in ways that thwart our best-laid plans. Matter, it seems, is not just sitting around waiting for orders; it is ceaselessly interacting, nudging, resisting, and, on occasion, outright defying human intention. This is Bennett’s **_thing-power_**—a recognition that nonorganic matter possesses its own force, its own capacity to influence and be influenced. The world, seen through this lens, is not a passive stage for biological life but a restless ensemble of material **actants**, each contributing in its own way to the ongoing choreography of existence. Actants are defined by Bruno Latour as all that, which has efficacy, can do things, produces effects, or alters the course of events. Once we transcend the anthropocentric perspective, we discover that everything around us is a network of actants, and that humans have no monopoly on causal power. Bennett contrasts Aristotle's efficient causality with something altogether more emergent: > Here causality is more emergent than efficient, more fractal than linear. Instead of an effect obedient to a determinant, one finds circuits in which effect and cause alternate position and redound on each other. If efficient causality seeks to rank the actants involved, treating some as external causes and others as dependent effects, emergent causality places the focus on the process as itself an actant, as itself in possession of degrees of agentic capacity.[^1] One under-appreciated feature of *not-so-inert* matter is the ability to self-organise. At the heart of this process lies the fundamental principle of **dissipation**. While it is often said that nature abhors a vacuum, it would be more accurate to say that it abhors an **energy gradient**. This is a direct consequence of the laws of thermodynamics. The first law states that energy can neither be created nor destroyed, only converted. The second law states that energy gradients will always seek equilibrium, reaching the highest entropy (disorder) allowed by the system’s internal energy. If we apply this to the universe as a whole, it means that over time, it tends toward greater disorder. What my physics teacher failed to mention, however, is that these laws also lead to a counterintuitive and profound phenomenon: while the universe as a whole becomes more disordered, **local pockets of increasing order continuously emerge**. This happens because when an energy gradient is present, the higher-energy region dissipates into the lower-energy region until equilibrium is achieved. Take, for example, the ocean warming the atmosphere above it. The heat transfers into the air until their temperatures equalise. This is simple enough. However, when the temperature difference exceeds a certain threshold, the system undergoes self-organisation. Instead of merely dissipating heat passively, it forms a hurricane—a complex, structured pattern that **increases the efficiency of energy dissipation**. This demonstrates a critical principle: _sufficient energy flow through a system leads to the spontaneous creation of local order to enhance energy dissipation._ This phenomenon, though it may appear mundane, has reshaped the trajectory of empirical science over the past century and a half. The first to recognise its implications was **Ludwig Boltzmann**, the father of statistical mechanics, who introduced the idea that ordered structures could temporarily emerge within entropic systems. [^2] However, as this was not central to his work, he did not explore it further. It took another 70 years before a great thinker grasped the significance of this effect. In 1944, **Erwin Schrödinger**, best known for his thought experiment involving a simultaneously living and dead cat, wrote _What is Life?_ [^3] In this work, he explored how living organisms seemingly defy the Second Law of Thermodynamics by extracting what he called "negative entropy" from their environment to maintain their internal order while excreting entropy back into their surroundings. His fundamental insight was that life sustains itself by importing order from the outside world. He even predicted the existence of a molecular storage system for biological information—an idea that later directly influenced the discovery of DNA by Watson and Crick. Building upon Schrödinger’s insights, chemist **Ilya Prigogine** developed the theory of _dissipative structures_ in the 1960s, demonstrating that systems far from equilibrium can self-organise, leading to order in chemical reactions. As he put it, “Non-equilibrium brings order out of chaos.” Prigogine and his collaborator Isabelle Stengers showed that thermodynamics introduced a clear **arrow of time**—a recognition that the fundamental processes of the universe are inherently irreversible. This insight was incompatible with classical physics, which traditionally treated time as symmetric. Their work contributed to the birth of complexity science, revealing that instability in dynamical systems is not just a practical limitation due to lack of computational power but a fundamental principle of nature itself. In their book _The End of Certainty_, they described how these ideas extended even to human creativity and innovation: > _We are observing the birth of a science that is no longer limited to idealized and simplified situations but reflects the complexity of the real world, a science that views us and our creativity as part of a fundamental trend present at all levels of nature. We see that human creativity and innovation can be understood as the amplification of laws of nature already present in physics or chemistry._ [^4] By the 1980s, **James Kay** expanded Prigogine’s concepts into ecology, proposing that entire ecosystems evolve to optimize energy dissipation. [^4] Meanwhile, **Stuart Kauffman** introduced fundamental ideas about self-organisation and emergence, challenging the conventional view that complexity arises solely through Darwinian evolution. Kauffman demonstrated that biological complexity is not merely a product of natural selection but also stems from **self-organising processes** that push systems toward critical states at the "*edge of chaos.*" He introduced the concept of **autocatalytic sets**, self-sustaining chemical networks where molecules catalyse reactions that produce more of themselves, illustrating how complex systems continuously explores the **adjacent possible**—the space of potential innovations just beyond its current state. [^6] We now understand that the emergence of spontaneous order through dissipation occurs at all scales, from the subatomic to the cosmic. This hierarchy of increasing order throughout the observable universe is known as **emergence**. Yale biochemist **Harold Morowitz** identified over 20 distinct emergence levels, from quarks to atoms, molecules, cells, multicellular organisms, civilisations, planetary biospheres, and entire galaxies. [^7] Since the Big Bang, these hierarchical structures have continuously emerged due to their ability to dissipate energy gradients more efficiently. And herein lies the crucial insight: at each level, these structures are not merely dissipating energy—they are also embedding higher levels of **information**. [[Information|Next page]] ___ [^1]: Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant matter: A political ecology of things. Duke University Press. [^2]: <a href="https://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/17/4/1971">On the Relationship between the Second Fundamental Theorem of the Mechanical Theory of Heat and Probability Calculations Regarding the Conditions for Thermal Equilibrium</a> [^3]: Schrodinger E. ORDER, DISORDER AND ENTROPY. In: What Is Life?: With Mind and Matter and Autobiographical Sketches. Canto Classics. Cambridge University Press; 2012:67-75. [^4]: Prigogine, I., & Stengers, I. (1997). The end of certainty: Time, chaos, and the new laws of nature. Free Press. [^5]: Kay, J.J. (2006). Self-Organization In Living Systems. [^6]: Kauffman, S. (2014). At home in the universe the search for the laws of self-organization and complexity. Oxford University Press, USA. [^7]: Morowitz, H. J. (2023). The emergence of everything: How the world became complex. Oxford University Press.