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Thank you so much for your engaging reply!

The tidy/untidy room is a good metaphor for physical entropy. Thank you!

I think that of the two components (memory and analytical ability), memory controls social intelligence. Afterall, if one cannot retrieve from his/her memory banks, the other component will be viewed as non-existent, even though it may or may not be there.

Indeed. That makes sense for all kinds of voluntary behavior.

The tidy/untidy room is a good metaphor for physical entropy

May I propose a tiny qualification to this statement? Entropy always refers to transformations of energy -- typically energy's penchant for "speading out" whenever not otherwise restricted (e.g., by boundary conditions or insufficient activation energies). It does not refer to the state of objects after such transformations take place (i.e., the disposition of objects on messy desks or in households for lack of "tidying up." It should be fairly obvious that such "messes" are the result of human failure to keep things neat, not the result of thermodynamic energetic processes).

The trickiest thing about entropy -- and I have been struggling with this concept in recent times -- is that it is a dynamic, real-time process that refers to the distribution of energy between systems (inorganic and organic) and their environment. Statistical analysis can "predict." But actual measurement is a retrospective activity: At the time we measure, the subject system has already "moved on." We can measure its passage; but by the time we do so, only as a "freeze-frame" of some evolution that is already in the past....

A good analogy is a hurricane passing through -- a self-organizing (that is, autocatakinetic) system that draws on both internal and external (environmental) energetic resources in order to exist. The phenomenon of the hurricane as an energetic system is an entirely different matter from the actual physical condition of the debris that it leaves in its wake.

It really is a mind-boggling problem, when the "physical evidence" you have (e.g., debris left in the wake of a past hurricane) that a phenomenon has taken place can tell you nothing about the phenomenon proper (i.e., the hurricane itself), in terms of its actual "disposition of energies." It seems that two categorical orders are involved here.

I need to find better examples to explicate this issue. Will certainly be looking for them.

Then again, maybe I'm "all wet" to begin with! :^)

Thanks for listening to my "rant," A-G!