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DanielLC comments on Ask an experimental physicist - Less Wrong
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Well no, it seems to me that there is a real physical process apart from our understanding of it. It's true that if you had enough information about a random piece of near-vacuum you could extract energy from it, but where does that information come from? You sort of have to inject it into the problem by a wave of the hand. So, to put it differently, if entropy is ignorance, then the laws of thermodynamics should be reformulated as "Ignorance in a closed system always increases". It doesn't really help, if you see what I mean.
What I've heard seemed to indicate that, if you assigned a certain entropy density function to classical configuration space, and integrated it over a certain area to get entropy at the initial time, then let the area evolve, and integrated over that area to get the entropy at the final time, the entropy would stay constant.
This would mean that conservation of entropy is the actual physical process. Increase in entropy is just us increasing the size at the final time because we're not paying close enough attention to exactly where it should be.
Also, the more you know about the system, the smaller the area you could give in configuration space to specify it, and thus the lower the entropy.
Is this accurate at all?