The universe doesn’t optimize entropy, it is people who make strong inferences coming out this way. See e.g. E. T. Jaynes (1988). `The Evolution of Carnot’s Principle’. Maximum-Entropy and Bayesian Methods in Science and Engineering 1:267+ (PDF)
On the other hand, you can always look at how something is, and formulate an optimization problem for which the way things are is a solution, saying that “so, the system optimizes this property”. This is called variational method, and it isn’t terribly ontologically enlightening.
The universe doesn’t optimize entropy, it is people who make strong inferences coming out this way. See e.g. E. T. Jaynes (1988). `The Evolution of Carnot’s Principle’. Maximum-Entropy and Bayesian Methods in Science and Engineering 1:267+ (PDF)
On the other hand, you can always look at how something is, and formulate an optimization problem for which the way things are is a solution, saying that “so, the system optimizes this property”. This is called variational method, and it isn’t terribly ontologically enlightening.