In my eyes, the major hurdle for an ideology of extropy, aside from the complexity of course, is the new age connotations already attached to the term. A bit stale and too readily scoffable.
"Extropianism" as it is currently conventionally conceived seems to be a new age, transhumanist ideology of pushing human consciousness and human welfare ever further. Extropy itself doesn't seem to be a scientifically embraced term, at least not nearly so much as entropy is. Perhaps there are similar terms that I am unaware of.
Really I'd be interested in an understanding of extropy that isn't centered around humanity, but of which humanity constitutes a sort of developmental frontier. It evokes a sort of Deleuzian imagery, of some outwardly crystalizing stack of layers of complexity, but such conceptualizations now strike me as venturing more into a poetic realm than a scientific one.
That said, it is my understanding that Deleuzian philosophy proper is about the pragmatic engineering of concepts, which I would argue ought to be field tested within a more scientific framework. That is, does this concept help advance an understanding of data? Does it inspire further methods of procuring further data?
How is humanity a frontier of extropy? Speaking from the current extent of my knowledge, it seems the human brain - namely the cortex, and I'm inclined to say some portion of the frontal cortex - constitutes a sort of biological state of the art. Of course, such advancement may not be so easily localizable, and may rather consist of the connections between areas than of given areas themselves.
And perhaps the hard problem of consciousness may be shelvable for now. Perhaps we may consider a sort of differential fabric of neuronal circuitry, these empirically distinct neurons differing phenomenologically from these, these circuits from those, etc. in such a way as to be less bogged down by how such pathways translate into experience. Perhaps an epistemological shift is in order. Perhaps, dare I say, experience is itself a spandrel.
Or at least the question thereof may be shelvable until further breakthroughs provide illumination.