CoinCube,
That is horrendous. I give you a D grade.
You characterize increasing information content as degradation.
I can see now why you are so blinded and deluded about free markets. Your conceptualization is all wrong. More microstates doesn't imply less of anything. For example, we can get more macrostates at the human level by increasing the population. The wisdom in the Bible of "go forth and multiply" combined with the fact that
every human is unique.
Entropy is the information content of a system, or in other words the minimum pieces of information required to specify the state of the system. In the digital world, it is the maximum theoretical compression of some data.
Who taught you that nonsense? At the university?
Law #2: That the quality of that energy is constantly degraded irreversibly.
The quality of the matter of the universe is constantly trending to maximum information content irreversibly.
From these laws we can derive some general principals:
1) Ordered energy -> Disorganized energy
2) High quality energy -> Low-grade energy (heat)
Low information content organization of matter -> Higher information content organization of matter
3) Order -> Disorder
Low information content -> Higher information content
4) Improbability -> Probability
Certainly few chances -> More chances
These principals outline a grim universe. At first glance they seem more compatible with a barren wasteland than a vibrant jungle.
These principals outline a beautiful universe competing to create more diversity and chances for life to prosper.
Thermodynamics demands constant and progressive degradation yet somehow we live in a world teaming with life and growth. Lets explore why.
Thermodynamics demands constant and progressive increase in the diversity of systems, i.e. higher information content, giving rise to a universe teaming with life and growth.
The Genius of LifeLife is able to increase its internal order while simultaneously satisfying thermodynamics. At first glance this appears to violate the laws of thermodynamics. Instead of disorder and death life forms order and birth. Instead of probability and cessation it does the improbable and continues. Rather than disorganized heat it forms the ordered thought and action. Life is able to do this because it is a
dissipative structure. It is a structure that achieves a reproducible state operating far from thermodynamic equilibrium in an environment in which it exchanges energy and matter.
Chemists can create complex high energy molecules in reactions that would not occur naturally by coupling those reactions with others that degrade other high energy molecules in low energy ones. As long as the combination of both reactions leads to an overall higher level of entropy the laws of thermodynamics are satisfied.Life has mastered this same process with stunning majesty. By coupling its existence to reactions that increase the entropy of the universe life is able to swim upstream against the tide of entropy. Plants harvest the energy of the sun. Animals consume that same energy indirectly.
The fractal nature of life is such that high information content microstates can also be formative of lower information content macrostates without lowering the overall information content of the system thus being congruent with the irreversible trend of entropy towards maximum information content.
Entropy is Mixedupness
There are numerous definitions of Entropy. When talking about the mechanics of life the most useful is the one given by statistical mechanics.
Entropy is the amount of additional information needed to specify the exact physical state of a system, given its thermodynamic specification.
Entropy is a measure of the uncertainty which remains about a system after its observable macroscopic properties, such as temperature, pressure and volume, have been taken into account. For a given set of macroscopic variables, the entropy measures the degree to which the probability of the system is spread out over different possible microstates.
The simple system of four balls traveling in the same direction, has less entropy than an otherwise identical system with 4 balls traveling in random directions as it takes more information to describe the exact physical state of the second system.
Correct, except you use scary terms that deceive and I stated it more simply at the top of this post.
Entropy is not mixedupness. You are trying to misconstrue information content as being disorganized. The randomness is simply because there are more chances for diversity. The system is still optimally organized to maximize efficiency. The only way we get efficiency is by being congruent with thermodynamics.
There is no uncertainty per se. The uncertainty is only because information about the microstates has been excluded, i.e. that is the information content.
Entropy Devourers Life
All life struggles to avoid its eventual guaranteed entropic end.
The conditions of death, decay, cessation are higher entropy then the conditions of breathing, growth, and body integrity. Therefore life is always in constant danger of death able to delay it's destruction only by constant feeding. Deprived of energy for a prolonged length of time life quickly falls to the laws of thermodynamics.
You've definitely proven that you've been indoctrinated with Marxist bullshit at the university!
Life is in competition to create more diversity and information content. You made a similar error as Ray Kurzweil in that you are only looking at the body as physical system and failing to factor in the information content of the uniqueness of each individual brain; thus the resultant diversity and information content that spawns from it. You are welcome to reread my essay
Information Is Alive! more carefully.
What I mean specifically is that you think the higher entropy state is returning the body back to dust, because you may suppose that dust has more information content
Your simpleton mind is conflating micrograins with microstates. Dust may not have more microstates (i.e. may not need more information to describe its states) than the internal entropy of the body. Moreover (same error as Kurzweil), dust is static, non-interacting and life is dynamic (and exponential interaction via network effects and Reed's Law) thus the information required to describe life is orders and orders-of-magnitude greater. Thus death without reproduction is actually the trend that is not congruent with the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics.
You Marxists don't seem to understand that natural function of life and renewal is already perfected by nature. It isn't in any danger, except when you Marxists think you need to save it (and then you destroy it by lowering the information content of the system).
Perhaps someone forgot to inform you that we don't live in a 3D universe (and the earth isn't flat).
I am sure you agree that entropy is dimensionless. So why did you forget that spacetime is 4D and besides the interaction of larger things via network effects (and over the time domain) is much more complex than just breaking 3D shapes into smaller parts.
You've approached entropy as a 5 year old would (except even when I was 5 I was probably already thinking about the fact that 3D shape has much less information content than time, relativity, and wave interference).
In reproduction this gives rise to a great need for fidelity. When reproducing life must protect the integrity of its information. Unless both the ability to gather energy and the ability to reproduce is successfully transmitted that branch of life will cease.
The genetic information transmitted from parent to child is not immune to entropy. Random mutation's introduce variations into genetic code. These mutations increase entropy as they increase the spread over different possible microstates. This mutation is very dangerous to life as the vast majority of mutations either have no effect or have a detrimental one. Life acts to minimize the danger by purposefully limiting this entropy. Most multicellular organisms have DNA repair enzymes that constantly repair and correct damage. Fidelity of information is thus largly maintained between generations.
Fidelity, however, can never be 100%. The environment is not static but dynamic. Life must be able to adapt in response or life will cease. An organism with 100% fidelity of reproduction would never change improve or evolve. It would stand still while its predators and competitors grew more efficient. Long term survival requires mutation and change. For this life needs entropy.
The tradeoff between fidelity and adaptability can be best thought of as the balance between search and exploitation. If replication was without entropy no mutants would arise and evolution would cease. On the other hand, evolution would also be impossible if the entropy/error rate of replication were too high (only a few mutations produce an improvement and most lead to deterioration).Increasing the entropy results in the potential sacrifice of previously acquired information in an attempt to find superior information. Life must master the deadly dance of harvesting entropy. Absorb too much and the species succumbs to mutation tumors and death. Absorb too little and the species stagnates and succumbs to more agile competitors. Life it seems walks the razors edge.
Genetic repair exists because the result is higher entropy than without it, because as you correctly point out that with unconstrained mutation the species would mutate away from acquired evolutionary functionality because the feedback loop of survival-of-the-fittest can not anneal too fast due to the roughly constant gestation and lifespan. Note that species with much shorter lifespans can mutate faster.
The key point that you are missing is the underlined one.
You attempt to paint entropy as dangerous on a microstate level without factoring in that the overall entropy is higher with the genetic repair in place.
Life isn't on any razor's edge. You Marxists (and your
“primitive, post-paleozoic, hunter-gatherer” contrived false flags and FUD) are![1]
This is why I stated you are misapplying a theory about genetic microstates to the overall entropy of the society. Major, major, major error on your part!
This is what I meant upthread when I said I would need to talk about the entropic frame-of-reference. I knew you were committing this error in your thinking. I was going to address it in my proposed future essay. Any way, now you know.
[1]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7W33HRc1A6c&t=73Multicellular Organisms and Collectivism
The single celled organism is an anarchist. The multicelled organism is a collectivist.
Simpleton nonsense. Also, you may mean to say that the cells in the organism are collectivists (which is not the same as nonsense that the organism is a collectivist).
Life often tries to get bigger. Bigger things can avoid getting eaten and eat smaller things. However, as a cell increases in size its volume increases at a faster rate than its surface area. Beyond a threshold this results in an inability to transport enough materials across cellular membranes to accommodate the cellular volume.
Correct that in order to grow larger in 3D then microstates must be amalgamated in fractal structures but again focusing only on 3D size is very myopic and off-topic.
Single celled organisms therefore cannot get big. Getting big requires collectives of multicellular organisms. Cells trade independence and degrees-of-freedom in exchange for the benefits of size, specialization, and efficiency. Cells in a multicellular organism lose the freedom to independently move and reproduce and critically their survival becomes dependent on their fellow cells. In exchange they get to be a part of something big and can benefit from the development of specialization including specialized neural tissues.
This is a relevant analogy because it elucidates why my theory about the Knowledge Age says that collectivization of humans will soon become unnecessary and undesirable.
Cells can't accomplish much by themselves. An individual cell without its brethren in the body can't even produce. Thus a cell has no choice and its optimal choice is to be in a collective.
Humans in the Industrial Age were in a similar predicament. They couldn't produce much by themselves. The home (cottage industry, i.e. Luddites) production of the 1800s couldn't produce at the same low cost as factories and individuals couldn't start their own factories because there was a large upfront capital cost. Naturally this capital had to be concentrated.
Whereas production in the Knowledge Age only requires a brain and a computer. Thus humans no longer benefit much from nor need top-down control. And the exponential network effects of Reed's Law promises exponentially higher entropy once we break away from the paradigm we have now.
Not all cells toe the collective line. Some cells throw off their chains and do whatever they want. When the rebels decide they want to divide and keep dividing the process is called cancer. The body's immune system can destroy cancer cells it is able to identify. Sometimes, it succeeds and the cancer is destroyed. Other times, however, rebel cells are able to make themselves invisible to the immune systems. When that happens the cancer cells get to keep doing whatever they want... for a time.
In multicelled organisms cancer is simply the result of accumulated entropy gone wrong. Multicelled organisms like their simpler cousins need to adapt change and evolve. A species with 100% fidelity would have no cancer but it would also never change. Warning: never ever use
this argument to comfort anyone with cancer! It won't go over well.
Again attempting to misapply microstate biology to the entropy of human society is simpleton nonsense.
Civilization and Collectivism
Civilization is collective of mutually interdependent multicellular organisms.
Civilization represents the next stage of evolution beyond the multicellular organism. Like the transition from the single to the multicelled organism it arises from the specialization and resultant interdependence of the sentient organisms that comprise it.
With the onset of civilization environmental selection begins to give way to the selection of self-organization. The organization of the system begins to increase spontaneously without this increase being controlled by the environment or an otherwise external system. Civilization is a state of vastly higher potential energy. This increase in organization can be looked at objectively as a decrease in statistical entropy.
Except human organization is not a decrease in entropy. Again you are myopically focused only on 3D shape. Refer to my prior explanation on your myopia.
Collectivized society in an Industrial Age is a decrease in entropy and that is why it can't stay forever. Fortunately we now have the technology to move to the next paradigm in decentralized production.
All self-organizing systems which decrease their thermodynamic entropy must export that entropy into its surroundings. Thus civilization like the monocellular cell is a dissipative structure.Entropy in the multicelular organism produces mutations and cancer. Entropy in the higher order civilization produces rape, murder, human-trafficking, and terrorism yet allows for growth, change, and progress. In the multicelled organism cancer is suppressed by the immune system. The functional equivalent in the higher order civilization is the police.
Hahaha.
That is entirely nonsense and bullshit. Since that is your worldview, it explains all your stubborn nonsense upthread.
As I already explained, this randomness is naturally constrained as necessary to maximize overall entropy and not just 3D entropy but entropy measured over every dimension including the time and network effects domains (and many other domains). There is a natural entropic maximizing reason that only about 2.5% of the population are sociopaths.
No the police don't do a damn thing. The functional equivalent of the immune system is your neighbors and their baseball bats. Remember the police never arrive to the crime on time (except in the Philippines where they are somehow always there before the crime begins
, although I read about Civil Asset Forfeiture and other instances where this phenomenon appears to be spreading Westward at an accelerating rate
)
Civilizations must change, grow and adapt or face stagnation, decay and collapse. They must maintain fidelity (stability over time) while also allowing for adaptability (growth). Self-organization to higher levels of potential energy in a self organizing system is triggered
by internal fluctuations or noise aka entropy. These process produce selectively retained ordered configurations and is the
order from noise principle by Heinz von Foerster. Search and adaptability must be maximized subject to the constraint of maintaining fidelity through time and not losing the information that has already been gained. It is only through balance that optimal outcomes are achieved.
The FutureThe next stage in evolution will be the transition to an interstellar species.If we achieve that goal we will create a system of yet higher order. This will be the entity formed by the interaction of multiple interdependent interstellar civilizations. Such an creation will have a potential energy that dwarfs our current society. It will only form if we find ways to vastly improve our technology and significantly improve our current dissipative structures. These improvements will be made possible by the very entropy we seek to overcome as we make the climb from probability to improbability.
Don't assume you know how the entropy will be maximized. It could even be virtual worlds.
In summary, you are oversimplifying the concept of entropy as being one about 3D spatial order. The information content required to describer higher forms of life is not dominated by the 3D states.
Sorry. I told you that you will never win this debate. I knew already what your myopia was even before you wrote this post.
