Why does entropy work backwards for living systems?

Why does entropy work backwards for living systems?

It doesn't. Living systems are not closed.

Energy flows freely as the universe moves from low to high entropy. Life needs the flow to maintain its local order but in doing so it negligibly increases the break down of the universe.

In order to make an omelette after the sun dies, you're gonna have to get creative.

Quoting Benj96

I find the fact that life is a self-organised, decreasingly entropic, complex structured system of equilibrium that regulates and perpetuates itself in an otherwise chaotic world.

On a celestial scale things are winding down, dispersing, cooling and ultimately leading in a very definitive direction - heat death. Things are becoming more disorganised and random and spread out. But life goes completely against that. It wants to be/ or has to be extremely organised and self-manipulating with the goal if reproducing the same system continuously to defy death.

I think the most remarkable change in the creation of life was the way chaotic conditions could (with the help of gravity) form incredibly consistent and diverse cycles -organised, repeating states of predictability and balance for which life would emerge; tectonic convection cycles, magnetism, orbits, day and night, seasons, precession and therefore ice ages, tides, annual temperature fluctuations and thus ocean currents, weather patterns, the water cycle. The list is endless.

Why is life so different. What does the living mean in terms of the function of the fundamental laws of nature, and why dies negative entropy occur to such a massive extent in a chaotic universe. Is gravity the opposite of entropy? A negatively entropic force combining and condensing things?

https://www.techexplorist.com/dark-matter-existed-before-big-bang-study/25576/

I also believe pan-psychism plays a role in this. There are over 11 different forms of pan-psychism.

Reply to Nils Loc :up:

Reply to Banno :up:

Reply to Banno :up:

Quoting Banno

It doesn't. Living systems are not closed.

:up:

Another aspect of it is that entropy is unpredictability. Your body metabolises environmental resources to keep its cycles in a steady state. If you do a thing which the body predicts will decrease steadiness, or you do a thing which renders steadiness uncertain, your body will intervene to reduce the discrepancies causing those uncertainties; shunting itself closer to what it expects. Homeostasis maintains a predictable order but needs an energy source to keep it going.

The sun is a free lunch for the world, until it dies.

Quoting christian2017

There are over 11 different forms of pan-psychism.

Why do you keep mentioning this?

Reply to Benj96 Others have already explained why life doesn’t violate the second law of thermodynamics, but I do think the relationship of life and entropy is very useful for defining what life is.

What constitutes life is an open question in the philosophy of biology, struggling to include all of the things that we ordinarily think of as being alive, but to exclude things that we don't ordinarily think of as being alive, like crystals or fire, that are too easily included in some attempted definitions. The definition that I find best suits this purpose hinges on the physics concept of a "machine", which is any physical system that transforms energy from one form to another, which is to say it does "work" in the language of physics.

I propose the definition of a property of such physical work, called "productivity", which is the property of reducing the entropy of the system upon which the work is done. With that established, I then define "life" as "self-productive machinery": a physical system that uses a flow of energy to do productive work upon itself, which is to say, to reduce its own internal entropy (necessarily at the expense of increasing the overall entropy of the environment it is a part of).

The universal increase of entropy dictated by the second law of thermodynamics is the essence of death and decay, and life is anything that fights against that.

Any system which stores energy essentially "violates" the second law of thermodynamics. However this is a "system local" violation. The system as a whole obeys the second law. Nevertheless, having localized gradients of negentropy does create interesting possibilities, so it's not an entirely unreasonable question.

Reply to Pantagruel
Quoting Pfhorrest

I propose the definition of a property of such physical work, called "productivity", which is the property of reducing the entropy of the system upon which the work is done.

Life's particular trick is neither in storing energy nor in reducing its entropy. It's more about the dynamics, which can be expressed in such metrics as entropy production rate, free energy rate, (mechanical) action or (technically defined) information. But this dynamics is not simple, with different, seemingly opposing trends that can be observed at different time scales. An explanation of these issues can be found in this paper: LM Martyushev, Entropy and entropy production: Old misconceptions and new breakthroughs (2013)

Or for a bigger picture check out he works of Chaisson:
Energy rate density as a complexity metric and evolutionary driver (2010)
Energy rate density. II. Probing further a new complexity metric (2011)

But what is evident from the various energy, entropy, action and information analyses is that life exists on a spectrum among a wide range of phenomena, as measured by these metrics, although it tends towards the far end of the spectrum. Nevertheless, if you want to give a sharp definition of life, you probably want a qualitative, not a quantitative distinction.

Reply to SophistiCat

Thank you very much for the references.

I'm not sure that entropy works backward anything.

Because entropy is to measure the unknown of a system from the perspective of the observer, it's not an existing thing that makes real effects like gravity field. Image God looking at a classical gas equilibrium system, does he see entropy? No, he only sees the dynamics of all particles, all determined.

Entropy is a powerful tool for humans to modeling the phenomenological world. This is why the concept of entropy is so popular, but I think we need to keep in mind that entropy plays a role in the modeled world, not the real world. Therefore I think the effectivity of entropy is an epistemology question rather than an ontological question.

Earth's biosphere rides on sunlight, and disperses energy just the same, from photosynthesis, through food chains, ever onwards.
While the Sun blazes, we're bathed in free energy that can do work (Earth isn't isolated), for better or worse.
What appears as temporary accumulation on one scale may be dispersion on another, though of course things can be more complex.

(Actually, isn't some of this stuff elementary school material...?)

Reply to fdrake (y)

Quoting Pfhorrest

I propose the definition of a property of such physical work, called "productivity", which is the property of reducing the entropy of the system upon which the work is done.

I believe the concept already exists and is called negentropy.

Edit: sorry, I note that Pantagruel already mentioned it.

Reply to Olivier5 Negentropy is what "productive" work creates, on my account. So, closely related things, but not identical.

My thermodynamic courses are far too ancient for me to contribute meaningfully, but there is a whole family of concepts related to entropy, including, well, work itself, which you might wish to check as one may already have been crafted for what you are talking about.