not going to get into the latter part of your comment, but in response to the former part, I haven't found a way to disprove the hypothesis that organisms' behaviors are all described by the attempt at maximizing the single variable of "number of possible future states" ala https://www.ted.com/talks/alex_wissner_gross_a_new_equation_...
… and I’m not convinced. It’s basically claiming that maximization of entropy over all possible paths in a time horizon leads to emergent cooperative behavior in some kinds of simple toy puzzles, but then claiming it as the center of human cognitive behavior is a far stretch.
It's far from being _proved_, but the more I've thought about it the more it seems to intuitively line up with other systems of behavior optimization
But yes, its actual application to, say, social psychology has not been rigorously (or even partially) established.
I have a fantasy that a grad student or two will go down this rabbit hole to see if it can be used to build models that hold water. But so far I haven't seen anything.
