Regarding Entropy and The Meaning of Life

I don't get your drift. But I do like the word entropy. Once I thought I "got it" and then some wag made a case about all the examples in the universe of all the things that are moving toward order and complexity. That made me go "hmmm?"

I know this is easily distinguishable (proven wrong), but I liken the decrease in animal size to an entropy of sorts. From dinosaurs to Pleistocene mega fauna, down to the current situation. Hunting ain't what it used to be, or could be. Damn entropy!

Reply to James Riley

1. Humans on a Planet; Humans move around the planet; This is a determined system.
2. Humans create houses; Humans move around the planet and enter/exit houses; This is a altered determined system.

What allows us to alter determined systems is entropy! In [1]'s state, entropy of the human mind (system approaching total chaos) associates [2]. The reason why humans go from state 1, to state 2, is likely due to negative entropy in matters concerning security and warmth; entropy of the world is less likely, worlds are mostly harmonious. What I'm suggesting is that the jump from 1 to 2 is caused by humans and a situation where the planet causes a system jump is less likely... Of course, this is a shoddy example as state 2 is determined in state 1 because of how much entropy exists in our universe, but it should give @James Riley a good idea of entropy.

From Wikipedia. But I first read it in Hand's Cosmosapiens, I believe:

Claude Shannon introduced the very general concept of information entropy, used in information theory, in 1948. Initially it seems that Shannon was not particularly aware of the close similarity between his new quantity and the earlier work in thermodynamics; but the mathematician John von Neumann certainly was. "You should call it entropy, for two reasons," von Neumann told him. "In the first place your uncertainty function has been used in statistical mechanics under that name, so it already has a name. In the second place, and more important, nobody knows what entropy really is, so in a debate you will always have the advantage."

I should add, Sean Carroll wrote an excellent book called The Big Picture. According to him entropy and the arrow of time explain almost everything in the universe, roughly.

I'm skeptical, but he could be correct.

Reply to ghostlycutter

Hi ghostlycutter

The author, Christophe Finipolscie came up with a great phrase when discussing the principle of entropy and the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, (from which the concept came). He said...

"You cannot disassemble something before it has first been assembled".

Gravity was one way to demonstrate assembly instead of disassembly (entropy) but life is also a classic way to demonstrate regular complex assembly too.

Furthermore, Ernst Schrodinger defined life as...
"That which avoids the decay into equilibrium".

Quoting ghostlycutter

Entropy has a beneficent effect allowing us to make change in determined systems.

I don't think entropy "effects" anything, it's a description. What allowed us to happen is the fact that the universe was low entropy at the start, moving to progressively higher entropy.

To use Sean Carroll's, referenced by Manuel, analogy of coffee and cream, in between the original perfect division of cream and coffee (low entropy) and the ultimate perfect mixture (high entropy) is where interesting things can happen.

To understand entropy, you can best view it as a statistical law or law a chance I think. Low entropy is a state of a system that is relatively rare among all possible states of that system. High entropy then are states that are common/numerous. All things being equal, it's more likely that over time the more numerous states will occur rather that rare states.

And as things naturally will tend to higher entropy because of chance, maintaining low entropy in a subsystem requires energy from the outside... we, life in general, require energy to maintain homeostasis to fight off overall increase in entropy.

Therefor you could say that the meaning of life is literally taking in energy to fend off increase in entropy.

Quoting ChatteringMonkey

Therefor you could say that the meaning of life is literally taking in energy to fend off increase in entropy.

Yep, thereby transforming that new energy into waste and contributing to the net increase in entropy. Neat how we (the entire biosphere, in fact) is entangled in this (cosmic) dissipative process like dingleberries floating downstream.

Quoting 180 Proof

Yep, thereby transforming that new energy into waste and contributing to the net increase of entropy. Neat how we (the entire biosphere, in fact) is entangled in this (cosmic) dissipative process like dingleberries floating downstream.

There is no alternative. Life, any life, depends on creating entropy. Faster than non-living physical processes in the same temperature-range generally do. The only remedy to this is to delete life, all life, to slow down the progress of entropy; but then you are left with a world which has no motivation, no needs, no joy, no suffering; no sensation and no awareness, a completely indifferent world, which can't enjoy its own slowed-down entropy.

But my own self-created theory about entropy is that matter can be reset to an earlier state of entropy without creating more entropy. Don't ask me how or where or why, but it can be done and I have a proof for it.

From ‘The Order of Time’:

Carlo Rovelli: If we observe a phenomenon that begins in a state of lower entropy, it is clear why entropy increases - because in the process of reshuffling everything becomes disordered. But why do the phenomena that we observe around us in the cosmos begin in a state of lower entropy in the first place?

Here we get to the key point. If the first twenty-six cards in a pack are all red and the next twenty-six are all black, we say that the configuration of the cards is ‘particular’; that it is ‘ordered’. This order is lost when the pack is shuffled. The initial ordered configuration is a configuration ‘of low entropy’. But notice that it is particular if we look at the colour of the cards - red or black. It is is particular because I am looking at the colour. Another configuration will be particular if the first twenty-six cards consist of only hearts and spades. Or if they are all odd numbers, or the twenty-six most creased cards in the pack, or exactly the same twenty-six of three days ago... Or if they share any other characteristic. If we think about it carefully, every configuration is particular, every configuration is singular, if we look at all of its details, since every configuration always has something about it that characterises it in a unique way. Just as, for its mother, every child is particular and unique.

It follows that the notion of certain configurations being more particular than others (twenty-six red cards followed by twenty-six black, for example) makes sense only if I limit myself to noticing only certain aspects of the cards (in this case, the colours). If I distinguish between all the cards, the configuration are all equivalent: none of them is more or less particular than others. The notion of ‘particularity’ is born only at the moment we begin to see the universe in a blurred and approximate way.

Boltzmann has shown that entropy exists because we describe the world in a blurred fashion. He has demonstrated that entropy is precisely the quantity that counts how many are the different configurations that our blurred vision does not distinguish between. Heat, entropy and the lower entropy of the past are notions that belong to an approximate, statistical description of nature.

Beautiful source materials - no objections.

I take it you don't contest the OP?

Reply to Possibility Kudos to Carlo Rovelli. Order is a human concept, and any configuration is up to being called "order" or "disorder" by humans, according to how "blurred" their discerning the orderization of the pile of things.

I propose furthermore, than Chaos does not exist in a deterministic universe, for the same reason.

However, I do support the idea of heat-death and I do suppor the idea of entropy of order. Here's one thought experiment to conisder why I support the entropy of order.

Take a bunch of nails. Throw them randomly, one-by-one, into a box. Their collective centre of gravity will be X units above the bottom of the box. Now shake the box. The nails will rearrange themselves, to lower the centre of their collective gravity. On other words, they will pack a bit down if you shake the box gently. If you keep shaking the box gently, the centre of gravity will never shift "up".

This has mechanical - static - dynamic explanation on the level of the individual nails, but looking at the big picture, this is one way entropy manifests, because there is no equilibrium, there is only a one-way route to a state of lower energy level.

Think of the pack of cards.

14 red 14 black. Implication, lots of red/black combinations.

You shuffle them, justly creating change (in determined system).

A pattern emerges.

The pattern is either new and beneficent, known already or beneficent to something new. It can also be improving rather than new.

Shuffling here, is a beneficent effect of entropy, caused by core mental processes(switching, running, etc).

All combinations of card are already known in statement 2. So it's only an example of change in a determined system, not entropy. Entropy is the shuffle and achieve certain pattern part.

So I have this image in my head of the correct entropy but can't describe it. Want to have a whack at it??

P.s perhaps it already was explained but I am yet to be enlightened

Here's a pertinent article: How Maxwell’s Demon Continues to Startle Scientists

Quoting ghostlycutter

I take it you don't contest the OP?

I don’t think it’s that simple. I think our ‘blurring’ is sometimes deliberate to convince ourselves that order is created out of disorder, as in Reply to god must be atheist’s nail example.

Entropy is not ‘the shuffle and achieve certain pattern part’ - that’s energy. Entropy is “the number of macroscopic states that our blurred vision of the world fails to distinguish” (my emphasis). It’s whatever we’re NOT focused on - our ignorance of the changes that occur beyond our blurred vision when we think we’re ‘creating good change’ or ‘improving systems’.

There is no ‘correct entropy’, as such. What we call ‘beneficent’ is just so in our limited, blurred perspective.

Rovelli:So, if I could take into account all the details of the exact, microscopic state of the world, would the characteristic aspect of the flowing of time disappear?

Yes. If I observe the macroscopic state of things, then the difference between past and future vanishes. The future of the world, for instance, is determined by its present state - though neither more nor less than is the past. We often say that causes precede effects and yet, in the elementary grammar of things, there is no distinction between ‘cause’ and ‘effect’. There are regularities, represented by what we call physical laws, that link events of different times, but they are symmetric between future and past. In a microscopic description, there can be no sense in which the past is different from the future.

Reply to 180 Proof Reply to god must be atheist Reply to Possibility

To say that Life is part of entropy because it consumes (disassembles) its food/nutrients ignores the incredible amount of assembly that it does in creating living beings (described as the most complex things in the universe) which in turn assemble buildings etc.

Why do you choose to isolate the negatives and ignore the positives?

In the universe as a whole, there had to be assembly in the first place before increasing disorder was able to take effect.

It seems to me that within the universe there are effects which assemble and some which disassemble. They are all part of a cyclical system.

What most scientists choose to do is to ignore the incredible mechanisms of assembly because they cannot explain them within their one doctrine of entropic chemistry/physics.

Its about time that scientists woke up to the importance of assembly and to investigate it properly.

Schrodinger was on the right track.

Carlo Rovelli:If we observe a phenomenon that begins in a state of lower entropy, it is clear why entropy increases - because in the process of reshuffling everything becomes disordered. But why do the phenomena that we observe around us in the cosmos begin in a state of lower entropy in the first place?

Is a big bang low entropy? :nerd:

:fire:

Quoting Gary Enfield

Why do you choose to isolate the negatives and ignore the positives?

In the universe as a whole, there had to be assembly in the first place before increasing disorder was able to take effect.

No choice. That's how entropy works. "Assembly" increases global entropy by decreasing local entropy with energy added from the environnent (i.e heat source) that is mostly lost through transmission or storage media radiating it back into the environment (i.e. heat sink). "Assembly" ("positives") – local order – is simply disorder's way of increasing global disorder ("negatives"). And, lastly, assuming "assembly before entropy" does not makes sense because "before" (i.e. temporality) presupposes entropy. Of course, we're always more interested in the signal than the noise and yet without noise signals would be unintelligible (i.e. invisible) like stars without darkness.

Quoting Pop

Is a big bang low entropy?

A white hole would be. A Planck era universe certainly has lower – farther-from-thermodynamic-equilibrium – entropy than that of the post-Planck era (inflationary) expansion.

Reply to Gary Enfield I don’t think we’re ignoring the positives, just because we’re focusing on entropy. I don’t know how we would see entropy as a positive, but that doesn’t mean I don’t see the capacity of life as a positive.

I do think that life as a whole plays an important role in consolidating localised states of low entropy. This creates stable reserves of energy, like how all our fossil fuels came about. Unfortunately, most of what humans are ‘assembling’ these days has the effect of consuming more energy than we store away. I agree that the importance of creating sustainable conditions of low entropy has been largely overlooked in the race to find more accessible and efficient reserves of energy to consume. But it’s not a case of either/or: whenever we assemble, we’re also disassembling. When we create, we are also consuming. And they can’t cancel each other out when we drill for oil here to assemble buildings on the other side of the world. We’re redistributing the flow of energy, largely ignorant of how it all connects and supports each other.

So, if we’re talking, not just about life making changes in determined systems, but about entropy ‘allowing us to make changes in determined systems’, then I question whether this is ‘beneficent’, because this entropy is our ignorance of how the changes we make locally impact what is outside our focus.

Reply to 180 Proof

Quoting 180 Proof

No choice. That's how entropy works. "Assembly" increases global entropy by decreasing local entropy with energy added from the environment (i.e heat source) that is mostly lost through transmission or storage media radiating it back into the environment (i.e. heat sink).

I don't think that's correct.
The whole underlying philosophy of physics is that the size of the universal pot never alters. Nothing is ever lost, it just changes. If there is assembly, then there is aggregation and potentially greater order in that place, then there may be less energy elsewhere, but it doesn't mean that there is greater disorder. Overall, the pot won't change size - there won't be greater disorder or less energy overall.

The whole point I was making, is that by emphasising entropy, physicists effectively localize on those bits where energy is dissipating while ignoring those places where it is increasing and in a pot that doesn't change the overall amount of energy, that's a distorting bias.

Pop was right - the Big Bang not only spread energy but it was undeniably a major assembly event for Matter/Energy - especially if you believe in a big crunch.

Again, by focussing on entropy (both in terms of energy and implied disorder) you miss the potential balancing of the pot and the need for assembly - which is not less entropy (a reduced rate of entropy) but genuine assembly.

Reply to Possibility
Hi Possibility

To clarify a couple of background points before we get onto the proper discussion - I was categorizing entropy as negative, and assembly as positive. As I said to '180 Proof' above, assembly isn't reduced entropy but actually the reverse of entropy within a balanced pot.

I agree with you that we, as a species, are definitely consuming in a highly entropic way, and that our assemblies don't fully compensate for the entropy as yet - but there are various things in nature which do genuinely assemble - with Life and Gravity being the two prominent ones... as I think you were implying.

That said, I feel that we have to be careful to distinguish those activities which genuinely increase entropy, from those which are neutral or negative on the entropy front. In other words, a change in itself isn't necessarily bad. We have to see what a change achieves over the course of its life.

As two simple examples, we can a) cover a mountain with mirrors to harvest and use light in particular ways over a long period to reduce our necessary consumption of other resources, and potentially without increasing global warming. b) we can plant forests which grow based on the energy of the sun, and which seem like a good example of life's assembly.

However this needs to be distinguished from the harmful effects of global warming, (which is also an assembly of energy).

At the risk of going off at a tangent here - if I understand the science correctly, forests only act as a net carbon sink after some 25 to 30years, because the rotting material on the ground around the forest outweighs the absorbed CO2 for the first 10 - 15 years and then it takes a further 10-15 yrs before the deficit is soaked up by the larger trees. By implication, if we planted a forest and then left it, we would be doing a positive thing and 'storing CO2' and energy in the wood. But industrial farming of wood - collecting it every 25 years is at best carbon neutral.

Is such energy storage the reverse of entropy?

Reply to Gary Enfield Whatever your so-called "philosophy of physics" says, it's not physics and what I wrote, though dumbed-down considerably for mass consumption, is correct. Nothing more to discuss here since at least one of us gets the basic facts wrong.

First of all, I tend to prefer the term ‘arrange’, rather than ‘assemble’. I don’t think there’s necessarily a pre-determined purpose or reason for things to be brought together a certain way. But I do think there is an underlying logic.

Quoting Gary Enfield

Is such energy storage the reverse of entropy?

In my limited understanding of entropy, I would say no. You don’t reverse entropy, you reduce it locally in a creative arrangement of matter and energy. But the more localised your arrangement, the more entropy you are going to generate. Because this arrangement assumes a ‘balanced pot’ of known matter and energy. Entropy is the unknown change.

While I think you make some excellent points about the difference between planting a forest for its own sake versus planting one for short term use, I have to say that I do agree more with @180 Proof’s account of the physics.

In a closed system, if you assume a finite ‘pot’ (balanced or not), then entropy increases. This is indisputable. So it isn’t ‘balanced’ as such. The more we create assumptions of ‘balanced pots’, the more we will increase entropy (unknown change) in the world/universe beyond our focus.

Energy has a flow - when we measure and quantify it, we ‘close’ the system in which we are focused, and that inevitably increases entropy. We need to recognise that quantity is only part of the story.

Reply to Possibility :up:

Reply to Possibility

Hi Possibility

If entropy is based on the notion of energy flowing away from an aggregation of energy, I do not see why you should label the accumulation of energy as an accumulation of entropy? Are you saying that an accumulation is a gathering of the potential for faster dispersal? That seems ridiculous. Entropy is the dispersal not the accumulation. So let's call accumulation accumulation and not arrangement.

Entropy has also been extended into the concept of breaking down order into disorder. In the same way as the last paragraph, why are you saying that a build-up of order is not assembly but a build up of entropy. That again seems ridiculous.

Focussing on Entropy, whether the outward flow of energy or a tendency for order to break down more rapidly after a period of accumulation/assembly, still ignores the fact that assembly has occurred. Increased entropy isn't happening while there is accumulation.

Quoting Gary Enfield

If entropy is based on the notion of energy flowing away from an aggregation of energy, I do not see why you should label the accumulation of energy as an accumulation of entropy? Are you saying that an accumulation is a gathering of the potential for faster dispersal? That seems ridiculous. Entropy is the dispersal not the accumulation. So let's call accumulation accumulation and not arrangement.

Entropy has also been extended into the concept of breaking down order into disorder. In the same way as the last paragraph, why are you saying that a build-up of order is not assembly but a build up of entropy. That again seems ridiculous.

Focussing on Entropy, whether the outward flow of energy or a tendency for order to break down more rapidly after a period of accumulation/assembly, still ignores the fact that assembly has occurred. Increased entropy isn't happening while there is accumulation.

As Rovelli states, “Entropy is a measurable and calculable quantity that increases or remains the same but never decreases, in an isolated process.” This is the second law of thermodynamics. So whenever it seems as if we are reducing entropy in a system, we need to recognise that the system we are focused on is merely a temporary arrangement within a broader system, and not an isolated process.

I did not say that a build up of order is not assembly - I said that it also increases entropy outside of what is ‘assembled’. There is a tendency here to assume that in what you assemble you’re accumulating energy, and thereby reducing entropy, but it only appears that way when you focus narrowly on the system you’re assembling. You’re not accumulating energy, you’re arranging structures of matter and the flow of energy as a relatively ‘stable’ system of low entropy. This has not reversed entropy overall - it has only temporarily reduced it within that system of focus. Keeping that system stable requires energy coming in by breaking down other created systems of low entropy, AND entropy being expelled into a wider system beyond this focus.

So when I say that we’re creating a store of energy, I don’t mean that we’re increasing the accumulation of energy, but that we’re temporarily keeping a certain amount of energy stable, simply by being alive. What we do on top of that - including burning fossil fuels for comfort and entertainment or planting trees for their own sake - determines whether we are increasing the amount of energy that is being kept in other low entropy systems, or increasing entropy by breaking down these other systems.

Much of the materials we use now for assembling structures such as shelter, clothing and tools are chosen for their stability, and require large amounts of energy to be established as such. We do this because our main focus is on keeping our own personal systems in an ongoing state of low entropy. The less effort I need to make, the less energy I need to use. But if we focus on a more global system, then it appears I’m releasing a lot of energy stores to keep a small, localised area stable - and this results in an increase of entropy on a global scale that far outweighs the small store of energy that I personally keep. But this global system, too, is a localised arrangement of matter and energy, so even if we manage to create arrangements that ‘reduce’ the entropy within our global ecosystem, we need to recognise that this will have implications for the quantity of universal entropy.

If we focus on assembly, then we ignore the entropy that is expelled. If we focus on entropy, the fact that it never decreases ensures that we locate this arrangement in a broader system, and recognise that there is missing information regarding the flow of energy/entropy.

Quoting Manuel

Sean Carroll wrote an excellent book called The Big Picture.

A review.

Quoting Possibility

I tend to prefer the term ‘arrange’, rather than ‘assemble’. I don’t think there’s necessarily a pre-determined purpose or reason for things to be brought together a certain way. But I do think there is an underlying logic.

As I don't hold to physicalism, I am sceptical of the effort to explain living things in terms of physical laws. I'm sceptical of the idea that the increase in order that we see with the evolution of life and the development of technological culture is literally balanced by an increase of entropy in the universe generally. As I mention below, I don't see how this is conceivably testable as an hypothesis.

The related question I have is that, just as there is 'the arrow of time', there at least seems to be an 'arrow of complexity' i.e. more intelligent and self-aware beings have developed over time. However, this belief is rejected as orthogenetic by mainstream science.

I would like, for example, to at least entertain the notion that the evolution of intelligent beings fulfils a natural purpose - that there is an inherent tendency in nature to evolve towards greater levels of self-awareness. However this too is rejected as taboo in evolutionary science on the grounds that it is teleological, it presumes a purpose when there can be no purposes with an intelligent agent. And the only intelligent agent that science knows of is h. sapiens.

Quoting 180 Proof

Assembly" increases global entropy by decreasing local entropy with energy added from the environnent (i.e heat source) that is mostly lost through transmission or storage media radiating it back into the environment (i.e. heat sink). "Assembly" ("positives") – local order – is simply disorder's way of increasing global disorder ("negatives").

Do you think this is a falsifiable hypothesis? Is there any way of knowing whether this is actually true? I mean, it might be a mere sleight-of-hand, to compensate for what is otherwise an inconvenient truth.

Reply to Wayfarer What? It's a sketch of the 2nd law of thermodynamics (entropy) – you must've heard of it. :roll:

As I don't hold to physicalism, I am sceptical of the effort to explain living things in terms of physical laws.

"If scientific analysis were conclusively to demonstrate certain claims in Buddhism to be false, then we must accept the findings of science and abandon those claims."
~Dalai Lama XIV, The Universe in a Single Atom: The Convergence of Science and Spirituality

Quoting 180 Proof

What? It's a sketch of the 2nd law of thermodynamics (entropy) – you must've heard of it. :roll:

Of course. Discussed it at length with Apokrisis, read up on it. What I’m saying is that I don’t buy it, as an explanation for the emergence of organisms and especially intelligent beings. It’s just as much wishful thinking as ID is, but for opposite reasons. And I’ve quoted that very passage from the Dalai Lama numerous times. Buddhism doesn’t have a dog in the fight, when it comes to the origin of life, but they do believe that the objective world is totally the projection of the karma of the beings that dwell in it. Had that been the intellectual background of the evolution debate heaven knows how it would have played out.

Actually the title of this thread says something. Evolutionary biology, origin of life studies, and the rest, deliberately exclude any questions about what the phenomenon of life means. They’re only concerned with proximate causes, which phenomenon causes which other phenomenon, and/or discerning the general laws or patterns that give rise to such phenomena. Put another way, the kind of causation that is sought by the natural sciences can only ever be material and efficient causation, as a matter of definition. So the question of why life arises on this or any other planet is out-of-scope for naturalism. Naturalism assumes nature: it’s simply a ‘brute fact’ that life does exist, and its existence provides the only evidence which is admissible in the court of natural science. And that is as it should be. When it becomes disingenuous, is when people like Dawkins and Dennett try to extend that to the question of cause or ground which is excluded from their arguments as a matter of principle. There is a very simple but profoundly consequential misunderstanding at the basis of that.

Reply to Wayfarer

Yeah, sure. It has plenty of problems. I don't need to agree with an author in many aspects for me to like the book and think it's good.

He is one author, Pinker too I believe, that think that entropy explains almost everything. I think that's wrong, but since the topic here is entropy I think it's worth pointing out.

At least he takes philosophy quite seriously, unlike Krauss or Tyson. Though more than Aristotle, he seems to me to be a Wittgenstinian of sorts. Plus, covering all the sciences in one book to attempt a unifying theme is commendable.

Reply to Manuel Hey didn’t mean to put you on the defensive, just a review I had noticed. But from it, I learned that Carroll does say in the beginning of that book, that there is ‘one world, the natural world’. But then, Carroll is one of the major public intellectuals advocating the ‘many-worlds interpretation’ of physics. Odd.

Reply to Wayfarer

No it's fine, I like to see these type of reviews, I tend to agree with them.

Yeah, it is strange. He says something like the other worlds are part of the one natural world, something like that. But there's no way to test these other worlds.

He has an interesting discussion with Goff about consciousness. Goff is panpsychist whereas Carroll is sympathetic to Dennett, but less extreme.

Reply to Manuel I don’t particularly agree with Goff but I’m nearer to his view than the other two. Actually in years passed he registered here to query a post I’d written about him.

Quoting Wayfarer

I tend to prefer the term ‘arrange’, rather than ‘assemble’. I don’t think there’s necessarily a pre-determined purpose or reason for things to be brought together a certain way. But I do think there is an underlying logic.
— Possibility

As I don't hold to physicalism, I am sceptical of the effort to explain living things in terms of physical laws. I'm sceptical of the idea that the increase in order that we see with the evolution of life and the development of technological culture is literally balanced by an increase of entropy in the universe generally. As I mention below, I don't see how this is conceivably testable as an hypothesis.

I understand your scepticism, and I didn’t say this equation was balanced. I’m talking about inefficiency. If you read my more recent reply to Gary, I think that life is highly efficient in maintaining order within itself, but the attention and effort required to maintain this order is ongoing, and so each organism does consume energy and expel waste. It is everything else we do to save ourselves time, money and discomfort, though, that lacks an awareness of how energy flows in the broader system.

When we turn on the heater in our house, do we know how much energy it uses? If we have the option to simply add a layer of clothing instead, theoretically we can calculate the difference in energy use within the global system - but do we? Entropy is the number of macroscopic states that our blurred vision of the world fails to distinguish. To the extent that our efforts to maintain a suitable temperature are inefficient, generating heat we can’t use or don’t need, we are increasing entropy. I’m not a physicist or mathematician, but I do think this is conceivably testable.

Quoting Wayfarer

The related question I have is that, just as there is 'the arrow of time', there at least seems to be an 'arrow of complexity' i.e. more intelligent and self-aware beings have developed over time. However, this belief is rejected as orthogenetic by mainstream science.

I would like, for example, to at least entertain the notion that the evolution of intelligent beings fulfils a natural purpose - that there is an inherent tendency in nature to evolve towards greater levels of self-awareness. However this too is rejected as taboo in evolutionary science on the grounds that it is teleological, it presumes a purpose when there can be no purposes with an intelligent agent. And the only intelligent agent that science knows of is h. sapiens.

I’m wary that your related question may take us a little off topic. I think you and I have interacted before on this forum with regard to the notion of teleology and evolution, and may have also been in agreement in relation to Nagel’s book ‘Mind and Cosmos’. I will say that I agree with you on the apparent ‘arrow of complexity’ and inherent tendency towards greater levels of ‘self-awareness’.

But I’m not sure that this necessarily translates to purpose. In his book, Nagel proposes a third alternative to the randomness vs purpose debate. I think there are hints to this third option throughout philosophy and science, including Kant’s ‘purposiveness without purpose’, the potentiality of QM, neuroscience’s interoception of affect and the notion of wu-wei in the Tao Te Ching. I think there is an underlying tendency in existence towards increasing awareness, connection and collaboration, as well as an overarching tendency to consolidate information through ignorance, isolation and exclusion. They have the potential to cancel each other out - and yet, here we are...

Reply to Possibility Indeed. Splendid response, thank you.

Reply to Wayfarer

Me neither. I don't quite follow his argument and what I can make out of it isn't persuasive.

But of course I'll take panpsychism over consciousness deniers or people who downplay what it is.

Reply to Wayfarer Who said anything about the particular origin of life? Not I. You've confused my post on disorder with someone else's, Wayf. As for you "not buying it", that's okay for what it's worth – science "sells" defeasible, approximate, provisional truths whether or not you/we "buy" them. And that notorious Dalai Lama quote points out that 'intuitive practices' like Buddhism (or other ritualized woo) are constrained by and not independent of, or its claims more truth-bearing than, the natural sciences; so that, by implication, whereof the natural & formal sciences cannot yet speak, we must remain either mystagogic or metaphysical.

This user has been deleted and all their posts removed.

What if nothing eventually can win against entropy? Does it then make everything meaningless?

Reply to niki wonoto

Quoting niki wonoto

What if nothing eventually can win against entropy? Does it then make everything meaningless?

No, meaning isn't solely defined by ultimate outcomes... what we do in between also matters.

Quoting tim wood

If only a certain kind of evidence is properly admissible in a court, why is it disingenuous to exclude that which is impermissible in that court?

When it's relevant to the issue, but not admissible due to the legal rules. What I'm saying is that evolutionary biology and naturalism generally has certain rules of evidence - what should be considered admissable. And I'm asking, is the question 'why do living things exist?' out-of-scope for that method. I think it's arguable that the question is not intelligible from the viewpoint of science. And that, because this is not appreciated, it leads to a certain kind of very pervasive misunderstanding.

This user has been deleted and all their posts removed.

Quoting tim wood

And never mind disingenuous, it is a necessary obligation and job of the judges of the court to keep what is impermissible out, for the which in real courts judges are supplied with whatever they need to accomplish that, and properly so. Agreed?

It is people who willy-nilly under the swell and sway of belief cannot stand the fact that the world does not operate on the basis of their belief, and so try to impose it. Belief is the murderer in the world, not science.

Belief the jealous, envious, green-eyed monster that what it cannot eat, it strives to kill.

Mr. Wood:

I see you may need a little tough love here. You've made some wild suppositions, and either-or arguments that are at best, non-sequitur's.

1. How does "the Judge" determine which "Naturalism" criteria is appropriate?
2. If the "the Judge" has a belief system (Atheist/Christian) how does that effect their rulings?

In this context, you have yet to define "Belief" other than your own arbitrary use of it. Please clarify?

Reply to niki wonoto

Hi Niki

Despite people's preference for emphasising entropy instead of recognising assembly/accumulation when it arises, something had to create the original 'accumulation' from which entropy started to spread energy out and/or increase general disorder.

If you believe in the big bang - big crunch theory of existence, the big crunch will effectively re-assemble, using gravity. We can therefore say that Gravity is an assembling force wherever it is perceived.

The current increase in the red-shift of galaxies might mean that we are already in that crunch phase, or it may, as is more commonly perceived, be interpreted as a breakdown of the bang-crunch mechanism - in which case there has been a spontaneous or random change to a previously eternal system.

Alternate theories of origin have therefore been offered by scientists desperate to avoid spontaneity or randomness. They speculate, for instance, about hidden curtains of energy (conveniently beyond our view) that produce a big bang when they touch, but are kept apart when physical matter exists between them.

In other words, they seek to describe a different eternal/cyclical process which is not affected by the perceived accelerating expansion of the universe.

The point of me outlining these strategic factors is that if we are trying to be honest about what is possible - there is logic to say that your concerns may be unfounded in the long-term.

It is convenient for people, recognising the current state of the universe, to place a general emphasis on entropy and increasing disorder, but strategically there had to be an accumulation at some point - which leaves open the possibilitiy / likelihood that it would happen again.

That said, I agree with ChatteringMonkey when he/she said that what we do matters.

As I posted before, we can see forces of accumulation, it's just that people don't want to label them that way. If we acknowledge gravity in this way, then why not Life?

Individuals may come an go, but life as a whole has only ever increased in terms of size and complexity.
I liked a phrase from one of my favourite authors (Finipolscie) who said
"Thought is the only thing that can cause matter/energy to deviate from its inevitable chemical path".
Collectively, a growing force of life may yet have a significant impact on physical events.

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Reply to tim wood


And never mind disingenuous, it is a necessary obligation and job of the judges of the court to keep what is impermissible out, for the which in real courts judges are supplied with whatever they need to accomplish that, and properly so. Agreed?

It is people who willy-nilly under the swell and sway of belief cannot stand the fact that the world does not operate on the basis of their belief, and so try to impose it. Belief is the murderer in the world, not science.

Belief the jealous, envious, green-eyed monster that what it cannot eat, it strives to kill.
— tim wood

Mr. Wood:

I see you may need a little tough love here. You've made some wild suppositions, and either-or arguments that are at best, non-sequitur's.

1. How does "the Judge" determine which "Naturalism" criteria is appropriate?
2. If the "the Judge" has a belief system (Atheist/Christian) how does that effect their rulings?

In this context, you have yet to define "Belief" other than your own arbitrary use of it. Please clarify?

(Second time, please answer.)

Quoting tim wood

If you mean the misunderstanding that theology (for example) is not and equally significantly cannot be any kind of science, to the end of trying to have religion (for example) understood as a science. Then amen. Is that it?

More the fact that science is looked to to replace theology, when it starts from different premisses and asks different questions. That is how it develops into evolution as a religion. It's believed that if you take religion out of the picture then life is somehow self-explanatory in terms analogous to a chemical reaction - it's just a matter of understanding how it got started, which is a daunting problem, but not necessarily insuperable. But what that doesn't acknowledge is the initial decision made as part of the scientific method, which is to exclude factors which are not amenable to objectification and quantification, then, having excluded them, declaring there's no evidence that any such factors are significant. It's a result of looking at problems in a specific way, but then extending that to declarations that are a fortiori out of scope.

Biblical fundamentalism clings to a literal belief that the Bible is a kind of scientific hypothesis - foolishly, in my view. But scientific materialism clings to the belief that it's literally false. I, for one, have never believed that the Biblical creation myth is literally true, so the fact that it's not literally true has never struck me as being significant. Yet the question is often implicitly viewed through that prism.

Ernst Mayr, one of the architects of the modern [evolutionary] synthesis, has been one of the most outspoken supporters of the view that life is fundamentally different from inanimate matter. In The growth of biological thought, he made this point in no uncertain terms: ‘… The discovery of the genetic code was a breakthrough of the first order. It showed why organisms are fundamentally different from any kind of nonliving material. There is nothing in the inanimate world that has a genetic program which stores information with a history of three thousand million years!’

The idea that ‘life is chemistry plus information’ implies that information is ontologically different from chemistry, but can we prove it? Perhaps the strongest argument in support of this claim has come from Hubert Yockey, one of the organizers of the first congress dedicated to the introduction of Shannon's information in biology. In a long series of articles and books, Yockey has underlined that heredity is transmitted by factors that are ‘segregated, linear and digital’ whereas the compounds of chemistry are ‘blended, three-dimensional and analogue’.

Yockey underlined that: ‘Chemical reactions in non-living systems are not controlled by a message … There is nothing in the physico-chemical world that remotely resembles reactions being determined by a sequence and codes between sequences’.

Yockey has tirelessly pointed out that no amount of chemical evolution can cross the barrier that divides the analogue world of chemistry from the digital world of life, and concluded from this that the origin of life cannot have been the result of chemical evolution. This is therefore, according to Yockey, what divides life from matter: information is ontologically different from chemistry because linear and digital sequences cannot be generated by the analogue reactions of chemistry.

At this point, one would expect to hear from Yockey how did linear and digital sequences appear on Earth, but he did not face that issue. He claimed instead that the origin of life is unknowable, in the same sense that there are propositions of logic that are undecidable. This amounts to saying that we do not know how linear and digital entities came into being; all we can say is that they were not the result of spontaneous chemical reactions. The information paradigm, in other words, has not been able to prove its ontological claim, and that is why the chemical paradigm has not been abandoned.

What is information? Marcello Barbieri.

Please understand I'm not coverly defending intelligent design arguments, but that, along with Mary Midgley, Thomas Nagel, Raymond Tallis, and other secular philosophers, I believe there's a fundamental conceptual issue underlying the scientific attitude to this question.

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Reply to tim wood

And never mind disingenuous, it is a necessary obligation and job of the judges of the court to keep what is impermissible out, for the which in real courts judges are supplied with whatever they need to accomplish that, and properly so. Agreed?

It is people who willy-nilly under the swell and sway of belief cannot stand the fact that the world does not operate on the basis of their belief, and so try to impose it. Belief is the murderer in the world, not science.

Belief the jealous, envious, green-eyed monster that what it cannot eat, it strives to kill.
— tim wood

Mr. Wood:

I see you may need a little tough love here. You've made some wild suppositions, and either-or arguments that are at best, non-sequitur's.

1. How does "the Judge" determine which "Naturalism" criteria is appropriate?
2. If the "the Judge" has a belief system (Atheist/Christian) how does that effect their rulings?

In this context, you have yet to define "Belief" other than your own arbitrary use of it. Please clarify?

(Third request, please answer.)

This user has been deleted and all their posts removed.

Quoting tim wood

Because on the assumption that it originated somehow not on earth or of or from earth, still, it arose somewhere, somehow. And that's the underlying challenge, it seems to me. It's all science, though not all the answers yet known, or it's all supernatural and inexplicable - which latter case in no way obviates a need for sense and science. That is, even if it's God, that really solves no problems

I say there’s an ontological discontinuity here. (If you know what that means, you’re ahead of about 99% of posters.) And do look at the dichotomy that is burned and branded into your evaluation of this problem; it’s one or the other, either something knowable to science, or Mysticism and Ancient Superstition. One would hope that philosophy can navigate this Charybdis without being sucked into the whirlpool.

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Quoting tim wood

Theology as idea a proximate cause of all kinds of things, especially madness.

I have never found it to be so, but I'll leave it.

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Quoting tim wood

Point being that more people have killed more people on religion's account than anything else

More than Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao Tse Tung? I don't think so. Religious wars are a stain on history, no doubt about that, but there have been many mass atrocities committed for reasons other than religion. But the point at issue is philosophical, not religious, as such. The fact that it has become associated with religion, is one of the reasons that the philosophical issue is so hard to discern. Culture tends to force everyone into one of two apparently irreconcilable categories - either hard-nosed, materialist science, or superstitious, gullible religion. But some are saying there is a third way.

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Reply to tim wood Quoting Gary Enfield

"Thought is the only thing that can cause matter/energy to deviate from its inevitable chemical path".

if I were to replace 'thought' with 'reason' then I would agree with this proposition. But if you say that thought and reason are the consequence of a material process, then we're on opposite sides of the debate.

This is because h. sapiens can 'see reason' i.e. recognise the reason for things, and the meaning of things, and can act in accordance with reason, which can't be explained in terms of determinism or material necessity.

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Quoting tim wood

And thought and reason grounded in a material process itself grounded in a material - a brain

There's where we differ. Everyone believes that - it's obvious, it simply must be the case. Well, I say it's mistaken, that it's a deep and pervasive mistake. And because of the way we've 'constructed' the world, then it's impossible to think of any alternatives. We're in a 'thought-world' which dictates how we see the issue.

I'm of the view that nothing is truly physical. Why? Because the nature of matter itself is uknown. This is proven by the fact that having built the largest and most complex apparatus in the history, science still doesn't understand the composition of the very simplest object in the universe, namely, the hydrogen atom. They harder they look, the bigger the questions become. They want to build a ring the size of the moon's orbit around the earth. I wonder if they did whether the questions would get even bigger. So nothing is 'really physical' or 'only physical', because nobody knows what 'physical' is.

As a consequence we're living in a world of assumed meanings, where we designate and label our experience according to notions of what is real that are culturally constructed. I agrree that it's devilishly hard to see through that - but that is what philosophy is about.

Anyway, I'm glad to be able to bring it to this point, even though I know there's no way you'll agree. But it's worth articulating where the difference really lies. (I have to log out for the day.)

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Quoting tim wood

And if molecules and atoms not enough, then something

I appreciate the effort! Seriously. But I'm questioning whether the origin of life and the nature of mind can ever be derived from physical laws and principles. And the answer to that is, what other kind are there?

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