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Squark comments on Welcome to Less Wrong! (July 2012) - Less Wrong
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Well, civilization is a superstructure of sentience an is more elaborate in this sense (i.e. sentience + civilization is more elaborate than "wild" sentience)
I take your point. However, I can turn it about and point out that cosmological structures (a category that includes the planet Earth) must by the same token be more elaborate than geological structures.
Sure. Perhaps I chose careless wording but when I said "cosmological structure formation -> geological structure formation" my intent was the process thereby a universe initially filled with homogeneous gas develops inhomogeneities which condense to form galaxies, stars and planets which undergo further processes (galaxy collisions, supernova explosions, collisions within stellar systems, geologic / atmospheric processes within planets) that produce more and more complex structure over time.
I see.
Doesn't that whole chain require the entropy of the universe to be negative? Or am I missing something?
You mean that this process has the appearance of decreasing entropy? In truth it doesn't. For example gravitational collapse (the basic mechanism of galaxy and star formation) decreases entropy by reducing the spatial spread of matter but increases entropy by heating matter up. Thus we end up with a total entropy gain. On cosmic scale, I think the process is exploiting a sort-of temperature difference between gravity and matter, namely that initially the temperature of matter was much higher than the Unruh temperature associated with the cosmological constant. Thus even though the initial state had little structure it was very off-equilibrium and thus very low entropy compared to the final equilibrium it will reach.
Huh. I don't think that I know enough physics to argue this point any further.