CoinCube's Contention: Life Prioritizes Energy over EntropyYour subordination of entropy to a 2nd class citizen of physics and nature is abomination and travesty of science and philosophical inquiry.
You have raised multiple heated argument against my prior
essay on life and entropy. As your writing style is somewhat fluid I have broken your arguments into ten primary vectors of attack. I will address each in turn.
#1 Entropy is not mixedupness. The fractal nature of life leads to an irreversible trend of entropy towards maximum information content. The interpretation of entropy in statistical mechanics is a measure of uncertainty, or mixedupness that remains about a system after its observable macroscopic properties, such as temperature, pressure, and volume, have been taken into account. The term mixedupness was coined by
Josiah Willard Gibbs. Gibbs was the first to study the idea of expressing the internal energy of a system in terms of entropy.
You certainly can make the case that thermodynamic entropy as explained by statistical mechanics should be seen as an application of Shannon's information theory with thermodynamic entropy interpreted as the amount of further Shannon information needed to define the detailed microscopic state of the system. This is the argument of
Edwin Thompson Jaynes and it may be correct. That argument, however, does not change the fact that at the simple physical level entropy is mixedupness. This definition is useful as it highlights how in its pure form entropy is of limited use to life.
#2 Life creates knowledge and thus increases entropy. Life spawns new information content that cannot be prediction a priori by the prior information content and thus the process of life is an entropic process.I agree that the process of life increases entropy. All reactions and events that occur in the universe must increase entropy. Regarding knowledge creation, however, the presentation of thaaanos
upthread appears to be the most accurate. Information is not created it is discovered, or carved out of the entropy of the universe. When two actors come together and communicate it is done by sharing a state, not flow but entanglement. Their later computation is based on the new information does not increase information content it simply shifts focus.
#3 The condition of life is higher entropy than the condition of death. The information needed to describe life is orders of magnitude greater. Life is dynamic and interacting and dust does not have more microstates.I would challenge this assertion. A 70 kg body has approximately 7*1027 atoms. That is, 7 followed by 27 zeros: 7,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.
In the body these atoms are aranged in a highly structured and ordered array that interacts with the environment in limited and controlled ways. The skin for example is an effective barrier preventing reactions with most outside agents. The amount of information needed to describe the interaction of 7*1027 free floating atoms with their environment dramatically exceed that required to describe a single highly organized and predictable living organism.
#4 Measuring efficiency in terms of energy is myopic, because for example I can achieve near to 100% efficiency for transferring energy from reservoir (eg. battery) to another but that has not achieved anything useful. The useful work as far as nature is concerned is the increase in entropy.This is a good example because it highlights the difference between energy and entropy. You can transfer energy from one reservoir to another you may even be able to do it with a 99.9% efficiency but always some energy will be lost. With this loss the entropy of the universe has increased. However, as you stated you have not achieved anything useful and actually have less usable energy. Life is concerned not with entropy but with energy. Entropy is simply a tool life uses to climb to higher levels of order and potential energy.
#5 Entropy is not an agnostic soup from which order rises. Nothing in the universe is absolute everything is relative. Generalized, global efficiency is the maximizing of entropy. Over the longer term systems self-organize (anneal) to prioritize global efficiency by elimination Cosaian barriers. Let me rephrase my argument using your wording from
Understand Everything Fundamentally. Life is an unsustainable internal order that will continue as long as it is able to defend frictional barriers against the more efficient external possibility of non life. Thus life is consistent with entropy and is a temporary local order that exhibits higher potential energy. These local increases in order are logistic meaning that due to Coase's theory grow in an S curve exponentially, stagnate then tend to disintegrate, as eventually the mechanism which is propping up the internal inefficiency succumbs to the external universal entropic force.
#6 Entropy is not referentially transparent aka it is an opaque context.You have yet to provide an argument to back this assertion.
#7 Entropy not just 3D spatial order the frame-of-reference. You must also account for entropy measured over every dimension including the time and network effect domains. Entities that are creating the most entropy in their system decide what is entropy and what is not.The time dimension is included in the definition of entropy for without allowing time to progress entropy is fixed and does not change. Observers watching a semi-closed system from different points in the universe may disagree on the rate entropy was changing but that difference would be predictable and consistent with
special relativity. Observers with different knowledge of possible microstates may also disagree in their estimates of entropy. However, in this event the observer with knowledge of the largest number of microstates would be the most accurate. I suspect your argument regarding network effects can be challenged in a similar manner but you will first need to further define what you mean by the "network effect domain".
#8 Reed's law proves that entropy is growing faster than potential energy can. Networks grow at a greater complexity scale then the cost of the networks.Entropy always grows faster than potential energy this is true via
the second law of thermodynamics. There have been many unproven estimates that attempt to measure the "value" of networks. These estimates include Reed's Law, Metcalfe's Law, Odlyzko Estimate, and Sarnoff's Law. These so call laws are mutually exclusive attempts to guess the value of network effects. None of them deserve to be called a law as none of them have come anywhere close to meeting that high scientific standard. Furthermore what these guesses attempt to measure is the value of networks to network participants. As in the case of the battery example above what is valuable to network participants is not entropy but potential energy.
#9 There is no convergence if entropy exceeds the rate the system can anneal. This is true if there is a top-down controller or not. I do not need to deny that in order to be correct in my argument against top down monopolies. I have never argued for a pure top down monopoly. Such a situation would be equivalent to a life form that did not mutate or evolve. It would be fixed and static and unable to adapt. This is the polar opposite of extreme entropy that exceeds the ability of a system to anneal. The optima is somewhere between these extremes. What I have argued for is not monopoly but some level of top down stewardship to ensure that the search through entropy is maximized yet limited to levels that allow the system to converge. Even at entropy levels levels below the
error threshold pure anarchism risks reducing long term optimization/adaptation as it excessively steepens the fitness curve. This drives all participants to the nearest local optima effectively raising the barriers to distant more global solutions. The proper role of socialism is to help ensure trailblazers survive long enough to eliminate economic friction. In a landscape with an extremely steep fitness curve those individuals may not survive or succeed. Crossing these barriers involves significant cost and we can get stuck in a higher valley of the N dimensional solution space.
The key point is that anarchism does not eliminate all the necessary barriers to maximize long term efficiency. Instead it forces conformity to the nearest local optima effectively raising barriers to distant more global optima.
#10 Collectivism leads to moral hazard and thus should be eliminated.Collectivism plays a needed role and should be improved and limited to reduce its current inefficiencies. How much collectivism is optimal is a challenging question but I would argue nature has provided us a useful model in the human brain. Characterizing the non neuronal cells in the body as dumbed-down and under control of a top-down monopoly would be a gross oversimplification. The brain is only under the illusion it is in control. The reality is our brains have been granted a very limited stewardship and the absolute minimal amount of control necessary to achieve specific goals.
The human body is a masterpiece of evolution. Our lives are possible due to a vast interplay of complex interactions that occur completely outside of our control and until recently our awareness. Blood glucose regulation, thyroid function, fluid balance, and immune response are just a handful of the multitude of reactions that occur automatically and without conscious thought. The vast majority of body functions are carried out by autonomous cells which is why brain dead individuals can potentially survive for decades if they are provided nutrition.
Nature has limited our top down control to a minimum number of critical functions:
1) Determination of physical location (Ensuring the collective can relocate if the need arises)
2) Ensuring continual energy intake (Global analysis of resource utilization and availability to ensure current and future supply)
3) Avoiding predators (Avoiding and if necessary fighting off large scale external threats)
4) Raising offspring (Ensuring reproduction and the survival of offspring)
These are the problems and challenges nature had decided are best dealt with top down. For the higher order life form called civilization I suspect that nature is correct and that these challenges, at the global civilization level, are most efficiently dealt with centrally. Outside of these limited roles we should work towards constantly minimizing top-down control. Just as we cannot top down control our immune system it is not optimal for government to top down control law enforcement. We should strive to gradually make this function independent. This is not a call to eliminate law enforcement as immunocompromised organisms do not survive long; rather, it is an argument for a gradual transition to community oriented law enforcement that is accountable locally. Just as our brains have almost no ability to micromanage individual cells. We should likewise work towards minimizing the role of government in our everyday lives.
Our current problems have arisen because our civilization is relatively new and unevolved. Instead of an intelligent government we are blessed with one that is mentally handicapped. This low IQ government has also developed a nasty addiction to the toxic beverage called debt. Most of us here on bitcointalk are the equivalent of a dissident minor neural cluster. We are the moment of hesitation the alcoholic feels as he is eagerly downing his third bottle of vodka. We should strive to convert the rest of the neural structure once it hits rock bottom (reset) and is more amenable to change. The long term solution is education.
