A Universal Information-Based Driver of Complexity Growth

The persistent increase in complexity across natural and artificial systems remains insufficiently explained. Current frameworks – thermodynamics, natural selection, self-organization – describe aspects of the process but do not directly address the underlying driving factor. Here, I propose that Shannon information entropy, rather than serving merely as an information metric, possesses a physical dimension that acts as a general driver of increasing complexity - here defined as the information required to describe a system’s organization. This concept reframes the apparent spontaneous growth of complexity, across very different physical and psychological domains, as a natural tendency emerging from information entropy growth. While presented here only in outline, the idea suggests testable implications spanning evolutionary biology, information theory, and complex systems physics.