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