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

From fire to respiration for human civilization

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-Greg

Extruding social governance from fundamental laws of the universe

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-Greg

Work Energy Flows

I've read three interesting books lately that relate here and relate to each other in a meta way: The Uninhabitable Earth, The Growth Delusion, and Origin Story. Key meta-takeaway is that in the long run, we humans need to figure out a way to optimally manage the flow of work energy (thermodynamic "free" energy) to best serve our purposes, with broad allocation across species (ours and others), and with minimal, ideally zero, unintended consequences -- minimum impactful entropy costs. Could also be lots of opportunity moving the world into that frame of mind as well.

-Greg

Hari Seldon

Back on the entropy thing, I think ultimately, the Hari Seldon equations and derivative laws we ultimately develop, if we last long enough to reach that stage of enlightenment, will incorporate the management of entropy and the distribution of its burden across civilization, along with similar distribution considerations of free energy that counteracts it. If you stop to think about it, fundamentally, it's what we fight about. The big issues of today and over time -- health care, climate change, food production, fresh water production, labor availability, etc. -- can all be viewed through an entropy/free energy lens. What remains then is the management of the other tendencies of human behavior like one-upsmanship, power grabbing, appetite for various stimuli or excitement, etc. -- which, when you consider the origin story writ large, it's also about disturbances or excitement that spontaneously arose in an otherwise boring soup...life, evolution, and human behavior have inherited that and it's what stimulates progress.

-Greg

Exponential Climate Change

Finished the book. His focus is on painting the picture of what the future will be like, in various ranges of "worseness" and how we might respond to it, and how civilization will likely get greatly reconfigured. I don't really think the guy is being overly alarmist or hyperbolic. Stuff is real. 

A main takeaway is that the model of progress we've had since perhaps the Enlightenment (post Dark Ages) needs to likely change. The upward exponential modulated by sine waves of various crests and troughs may well be permanently modulated down to sea level (literally and figuratively) by a negative exponential driven by climate. Progress will likely level or decline until we adapt to the radically different conditions,and it could take millennia, since we'd pretty much have to re-do everything we did over the last 12,000 years in a much more sustainable light. The technology might be there, but the geopolitical upheavals may take centuries to quell. 

Of course the degree of this can be mitigated by acting as early as possible to completely decarbonize in an orderly way, but the will just doesn't seem to be there. Too much inertia. And, no, onesy-twosy neoliberals driving EV's won't cut it. It's dramatic change needed across civilization.  Hopefully 2020 will be the turning point, and the youth marching in the streets will gain momentum toward action, lest their children live amongst the ruins of a once relatively prosperous civilization in a new, much extended, Dark Age, dwarfing any that hit humanity before...

My next book is The Growth Delusion...after a detour to a big history one called Origin Story, which, in the early reading, posits the idea of the universal law of an entropy tax on creating order, which climate change is precisely that!

-Greg

Thoughts on Entropy and Evolution

Physical laws (thermodynamics) assert that entropy increases -- we go from neatness to messiness over time. However, that is contradicted when it comes to life forms and the things they create. It's kind of my operational definition of a life form -- any phenomenon in the universe that self-induces movement against entropy. The only stuff like that which we know of so far is here on Earth. Ok, where am I going with this? Well, the idea is kind of recursive when it comes to humans (and perhaps any other intelligent life forms). Intelligence evolved to in fact do this better and at scale. Now, there are unintended consequences to this, where someone's decrease in entropy is an increase for someone else -- e.g. externalizing pollution, anthropogenic climate change, etc. What we might need to do is to figure out how to optimize this at all levels of human groupings. All we've managed to do heretofore is settle it by conflict, rather than thoughtful optimization. Maybe the objective functions suggested above can be derived from that kind of thinking, fueled by detailed, even quantitative, analyses based on all the science we know. [Aside: kind of has a religious tint to it as well since religions, at least in their origins, have been attempts to do this, but then hijacked, co-opted, instead by concentrations of power over others.] The tools, technology, institutions, etc., that humanity creates should be consistent with what makes the best sense in that kind of framework.

-Greg

Initial Musings about Entropy, Life, and Civilization

A fundamental law of the universe is that things tend toward a maximum state of disorder - entropy. An operational definition of any life form is some phenomenon that "momentarily" counteracts that through self-directed action.

Now, one life form's self-directed action can accelerate another's level of entropy (e.g. lion eats gazelle, invasive plants taking over environments, etc.). Humans have found ways to do this in very magnified ways both within and outside their species - to such an extent, it'll be carved into the geologic record as the anthropocene. Key to enduring survival of the human species is how to optimally manage the externalities, unintended consequences, and the like of how entropy is redistributed in the name of human self interest. Optimistic view is that current levels of knowledge and technology can be appropriately applied at a meta level to solve it. Willingness and cooperation are all that's needed.

Why do the greatest civilizational influencers in the history of the world eventually arrive at a point with idiots running them? Pax Romana, Pax Britannica, and Pax Americana all seem to have degenerated after upgrading the world. Is it a natural human pattern?

-Greg

Optimizing Circles of Entropy and Circles of Empathy

While touring sites of the antebellum South during my vacation, hearing the stories, thinking about history in general, considering some key forces governing social behavior, and thinking about what we're doing, a couple abstract ideas that have been floating around in my mind for some time now have crystallized a bit more. The notions aren't necessarily actionable in the immediate, but can possibly offer some gyroscopic, navigational, "north star" type guidance.

Simply stated, we humans naturally seek to maximize our circles of empathy but also seek to minimize the social entropy within them. In other words, we gravitate towards order, organization, comfort, abundance, contentment, and all that is "good", yet as social creatures, we attempt to share it with as many of our "kin" as possible -- in whatever way we define "kin" -- be it as our individual selves, our families, our tribes, our corporations, our nations, or as whatever level of commonality to which we feel sufficiently strong affinity. The crux is that these two forces often compete with one another at cross purposes. Securing "goodness" for oneself can imply "badness" for another.

-Greg

Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believers Guide to the Uses of Religion

The most significant "takeaway" from religious development, stretching back into prehistory, is its strong organizing capabilities in creating human communities. Since the number of mysteries to humans was far greater in the past, the "fill-in-the-blank" effect of religions has served to create communities around particular explanations. In the polytheistic epoch, there were gods around to help with each natural need beyond human comprehension -- like making rain, sun, sea, etc. And there were extreme practices that welded people together -- such as human sacrifice and the like. As the number of natural mysteries in human understanding has decreased exponentially towards current time, we then figured out that the uniting elements of these structures were the useful part and the extreme practices were less so, and thus evolved monotheism with a single god in the abstract. Over time, however, the tendency of people to inject their own projection of power into these communities pointed back to the need for extreme, often illogical, practices to keep the subgroups welded together even though much rust had grown (and we see that even today with phenomena like contraception debate -- bifurcating logic from tradition -- actual practice from dogma -- etc.). By construction, this abstract single god enables many who want to preserve their legacy to project the justification of these practices upon it without logical explanation, but to their own benefit. As we mature as a species, we will hopefully realize we can still have the communities, but remove such dependence, and thus decrement the god count completely down to zero.

"In Good We Trust"

We humans, and life forms in general, seek to combat that "other" in the form of entropy -- which tends to degrade us in so many ways: various diseases, cancer, mind aging, etc.. The notion also factors in some of the other discussions about internal and external social entropy we've had. It's all kind of a hierarchy and we seek to find some kind of optimum position -- "minimum entropy for me", but also "minimum entropy for wider and wider circles of empathy" at the same time (special cases of which are various religious communities and tribes). It's a strange coincidence that "entropy" and "empathy" are so similar sounding words.

-Greg

Life Out There

Conventional thinking is that to sustain "our" kind of life, there are a narrow set of conditions. If we perhaps generalize the definition of life to include anything that counteracts "local entropy" (spontaneously creating order where it otherwise might just be dust), then perhaps it can be contemplated that there are other "life" forms radically different from ours -- not carbon based, or otherwise. 

-Greg

Welcome!

Hello Readers,

The title of this blog is a play on words. As with all dynamic content, it is indeed a work in progress, but what's more is that the content intention is work toward enhancing civilizational progress through a particular lens of entropy minimization. This is the general idea. More posts to follow and collaborative posts quite welcome. 

Cheers

-Greg