Understanding Social Systems: A Free Energy Perspective

Abstract

Social systems are a part of physical systems. In principle, social systems can be described by physical laws. However, there is a long running debate about how much knowledge from physics can be applied effectively to understand human societies. Compared with the vast amount of literature in both natural science and social science, attempts to understand social systems from physical laws are very sporadic. In this work, we show that the structures and evolution of social systems can be clearly understood with some simple and well established knowledge from physics.