I wouldn't single out "sentient beings" as any kind of exception, just because we're aware of that "homunculus between our ears" whispering to us at all times.
Our self-awareness and knack for introspection through language, as special and precious as it seems, may be just another way to optimize more efficiently. It allows us to anticipate and avoid local minima (famine, extinction, loss of knowledge, ossification aka boredom aka overfitting) across larger spans of time, in a rather cool and unique way. It makes us see farther, walk straighter with fewer detours, tap into juicier gradients, appreciate art and novelty.
But it doesn't take us outside the entropy race, outside the laws of nature. "Boring and meaningless" is entirely in the eye of the beholder. How would you even conceptualize "boring" or "meaningless", for a structure that breathes and reacts in human generations instead of seconds? What is "bullshit" to a cell or an atom that lacks such linguistic sophistication? If you want a truly universal objective metric, a stable direction for "up" and "down", it's hard not to go with long-term maximization of entropy.
Our self-awareness and knack for introspection through language, as special and precious as it seems, may be just another way to optimize more efficiently. It allows us to anticipate and avoid local minima (famine, extinction, loss of knowledge, ossification aka boredom aka overfitting) across larger spans of time, in a rather cool and unique way. It makes us see farther, walk straighter with fewer detours, tap into juicier gradients, appreciate art and novelty.
But it doesn't take us outside the entropy race, outside the laws of nature. "Boring and meaningless" is entirely in the eye of the beholder. How would you even conceptualize "boring" or "meaningless", for a structure that breathes and reacts in human generations instead of seconds? What is "bullshit" to a cell or an atom that lacks such linguistic sophistication? If you want a truly universal objective metric, a stable direction for "up" and "down", it's hard not to go with long-term maximization of entropy.