Do Life Cycles Accelerate Entropy in the Long Run?

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Thermodynamic dissipation theory for the origin of life
https://esd.copernicus.org/articles/2/37/2011/

-Greg

Consider fractal layers, from basic living components through civilizational structures.

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-Greg

Reference Collection

Entropy: The Hidden Force That Complicates Life

Entropy: The Hidden Force That Complicates Life

https://fs.blog/2018/11/entropy/

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/336878361_Quantifying_Life

https://www.google.com/search?q=entropy+blog&rlz=1C1GCEA_enUS940US940&oq=entropy+blog&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i60.2249j0j1&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

https://phys.org/news/2008-08-evolution-law-thermodynamics.html

Natural selection for least action
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspa.2008.0178

Thermodynamic dissipation theory for the origin of life
https://esd.copernicus.org/articles/2/37/2011/

The potential for detecting ‘life as we don't know it’ by fractal complexity analysis
-- https://www.researchgate.net/publication/259436547_The_potential_for_detecting_%27life_as_we_don%27t_know_it%27_by_fractal_complexity_analysis
-- https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/international-journal-of-astrobiology/article/abs/potential-for-detecting-life-as-we-dont-know-it-by-fractal-complexity-analysis/81169D2F63946BCA4BB0DE6548597663
-- https://www.worldcat.org/title/international-journal-of-astrobiology/oclc/50515202?referer=di&ht=edition

Into the Cool
ENERGY FLOW, THERMODYNAMICS, AND LIFE
https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/I/bo3533936.html

The Common Extremalities in Biology and Physics
Maximum Energy Dissipation Principle in Chemistry, Biology, Physics and Evolution
https://www.sciencedirect.com/book/9780123851871/the-common-extremalities-in-biology-and-physics

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_and_life

https://www.neom.com/whatistheline/

https://www.google.com/search?q=big+history+life+entropy&oq=big+history+life+entropy&aqs=chrome..69i57.4951j0j1&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8



https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2577055/

TED: David Christian: "The history of our world in 18 minutes"

The Many Worlds of Quantum Mechanics

By Sean Carroll

 

One of the great intellectual achievements of the twentieth century was the theory of quantum mechanics, according to which observational results can only be predicted probabilistically rather than with certainty. Yet, after decades in which the theory has been successfully used on an everyday basis, most physicists would agree that we still don't truly understand what it means. I will talk about the source of this puzzlement, and explain why an increasing number of physicists are led to an apparently astonishing conclusion: that the world we experience is constantly branching into different versions, representing the different possible outcomes of quantum measurements. This could have important consequences for quantum gravity and the emergence of spacetime.

 

Sean Carroll is a Research Professor of theoretical physics at the California Institute of Technology and External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. He received his Ph.D. in 1993 from Harvard University. His research focuses on fundamental physics and cosmology, quantum gravity and spacetime, and the evolution of entropy and complexity. He is the author of several books, most recently Something Deeply Hidden: Quantum Worlds and the Emergence of Spacetime. He has been awarded prizes and fellowships by the National Science Foundation, NASA, the Sloan Foundation, the Packard Foundation, the American Physical Society, the American Institute of Physics, the Freedom From Religion Foundation, the Royal Society of London, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He is the host of the weekly Mindscape podcast.

 

fractal complexity => low entropy => life probability

The low entropy v. life correlation has been rattling around in my mind for a long while now, and happy to find I'm not the only one (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_and_life). A paper I stumbled upon also derives a possible methodology applying this idea to assess the probability of extraterrestrial life forms, or indications of their past existence (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/259436547_The_potential_for_detecting_%27life_as_we_don%27t_know_it%27_by_fractal_complexity_analysis) [note mention of the Mars orbital camera too]. The techniques describe spatial analyses, so got me wondering if this technique could also be applied to temporal observations on exoplanets -- perhaps needing various time series spanning multiple earth years, but still feasible. For example, if a far off observer of Earth could detect changes in carbon dioxide in our atmosphere following curves of fractal dimension greater than a "natural" process background, it could indicate the existence of an ordering process, something living, namely the collective effects of our civilization. More advanced civilizations might also have more pronounced fractal signatures, easier to detect. Thoughts?

-Greg

Entropy and the Life of Social Structures

Over recent years, I've been musing internally about notions relating entropy, life, and social structures. Seems the shores we are now lapping upon are strongly suggesting a convergence. So, I'll go ahead and share some ideas here, albeit pretty far out, but as we may be reaching the point for some degree of operationalization, it may now make down-to-earth sense. This is a long post...but hopefully fruitful, with you being of like optimistic mind, for stimulating a higher level unified, generalized framework for our thinking...

First, a quick "in the beginning part" -- If we think about it, life forms in the universe are things that tend to directionally or "intentionally" counteract entropy in their own local space and time. That's my operational definition of living things. Very general. Notice it doesn't presuppose carbon, etc. -- those incarnations and instances likely just localized characteristics of life "as we know it" here. At this point, we only know of those on Earth, mostly carbon-based. My hypothesis is that the localized counter-entropy property is a universal characteristic or indicator of all life forms, something to look for in our search, no matter what the "matter" involved.

Schrödinger also formulated a similar set of ideas way back when. The idea here is that Schordinger's paradox suggested that life forms violate the second law of thermodynamics as they seemingly counteract the tendency of increasing entropy -- a known physical law. The pushback on that is that life forms do not operate as closed systems, as they obtain useful energy and resources from the surrounding environment and then discard their products of life externally back into that environment, in a more disorderly form, as a byproduct of maintaining their own internal order. This then nets out so that global entropy and output thermal energy still obey the physical laws. Not to get too much into the thermodynamic science of it, but that's the gist.

Now, reasoning by analogy, social structures exhibit similar behavior. While endeavoring towards self-preservation and further advancement, tribes, families, households, organizations, businesses, multinational corporations, governments, nations, empires and the like all do the same thing -- maximize and compete for input energy and resources while producing external outputs of higher entropy and of traditionally less concern to internal processes and operations. It's you who cares about your neighbor dumping garbage on your lawn, not so much your neighbor. For most of human history up to the near present, this "live and let die" or "ignorance of unintended consequences" has been the modus operandi of humanity, but at this point in our history it can no longer be.

What then is needed is greater influence, governance, meta-engineering, or whatever we want to call it that deals with these things we in the know call "externalities" -- the overlooked entropy shifted from the internal to the external in favor of promoting the internal. Life forms do it, and so do social structures. The structures grow via successively, fractally, expanding circles of empathy -- radii within which only the internal stakeholders care and outside which only the external impacted stakeholders care. Traditionally, only the former has been precisely measured and managed. We are now incubating a framework to enable and operationalize the latter to be precisely measured and managed as well, and to characterize the interactions between the interior and exterior. Serendipitously, as we recognize, the Fourth Industrial Revolution has ushered in the ability to quantify and actionalize such social entropy.

These new measurement and management capabilities then enable civilization to innovate going forward in such a way that future technologies and social arrangements developed best utilize free energy (in both the thermodynamic sense and being virtually free from our local star) to resources to do useful work that satisfies both civilizational needs -- transportation, construction, information processing, internal environmental controls, manufacturing, pastimes, and the like -- but also to optimally manage the entropy outputs of all those activities in such a way that their effects are not adverse -- to widen the circles so large that they don't negatively affect anyone, or at least as minimally as possible -- or, more ideally, cycle back as useful resources serving some other circle -- analogous to the symbiosis between plants and animals. New ideas and approaches such as "circularity" are along that axis. More generally, socially thermodynamic external entropy considerations can then be input to all decisions of action -- investments, innovations, structuring, building, deployment and the rest.

An additional analogy with life forms is the use of regenerative information (DNA in our local Earthly case) for propagation and generational preservation -- with this information property being a necessary condition for robustly perpetuating the ability to maintain complexity, counteracting entropy in localized space and time. This also applies to perpetuating social structures,.while its absence conversely causes degeneration (analogous to cancer) resulting from cultural malaise, loss of purpose, rudderlessness, and such -- counteracted by enabling information-driven reinvention and renewal like Darwinian adaptation through information management analogous to biological systems. We note, for example, that technology-centric companies are particularly better at doing this kind of thing.



That's enough for now. Thanks for indulging. One parting thought going even farther afield -- if all this isn't just restating the obvious in the eyes of those more scholarly in such areas, maybe ideas such as these can expand to a New Enlightenment, or Enlightenment 2.0, where the ideas from Enlightenment 1.0 (note also triggered by a Middle Ages following a pandemic) -- to a more equitably and rationally organized civilization, an artifact of intelligently widening realms of empathy with the goal of pushing adverse entropy out to regimes where the unintended consequences become infinitesimal or recircular. We can take the next quantum leap. Gotta think big!

Cheers,
-Greg

Human Nature, Self-Governance, Big History, Entropy, etc.

I think it's that we are quite good at fashioning our external environment to suit our needs (although not quite good at assessing the longer term impacts that could well defeat the purpose -- more on that later), but we've just begun to attempt self-referential fashioning or management. Democracy is the first attempt at that in all human history. Autocracy, authoritarianism and the like are still in the genre of external manipulation, wherein the direction of manipulative force is mostly outward towards those ruled upon. This is the natural, lower energy, higher entropy state of things, as it was in the earlier stages of biological evolution, so there is always a natural tendency of  reversion back towards that state in any system.

Now, with that being said, there was a point in the evolution of life where it changed from just complex molecules influencing their external environment to a setup where *information* was encapsulated to transmit an optimal setup down the line, and, further, with the ability to improve the information as conditions change and/or new discoveries of optimality were happened upon.  

With governance, we're now at that pivot point enabling the gathering, analyzing, optimizing, transmitting, and revising information without losing it or destroying it and falling back (e.g. U.S. Constitution as an instance of this kind of thing). We've certainly recognized and stated the problem, which is a good start in an n-step process, but moving to the next step is tricky and we can easily fall back instead.

Good news is that much of our recent technology is akin to a vehicle for societal DNA, enabling all those things mentioned above -- gathering, analyzing, optimizing, transmitting, and revising information without losing or destroying it -- enabling us to go way beyond near-time and near-space predictions of where our actions can go, what they could do (good or bad), and enabling us to choose a flexible best path. We can for the first time measure and forecast on fairly grand scales. That's the good news, but not all "molecules", per se, have accepted it, and fight hard to keep ignoring it, as it will require some change in their form, so resistance to change is another property to be assimilated into this kind of evolution.

These are the forces at play at this critical inflection point, definitely on par with all the other "threshold moments" in the overall evolution of the universe, to invoke some big history parlance.

-Greg

Entropy-Based Governance

 Through an appropriate reward structure, to innovatively and sustainably advance civilization.

"Entropy-Based Governance"

GREEN = Governance Relevant by Energy and Entropy Numerics

-Greg