(December 27, 2017 at 11:00 pm)Fireball Wrote: Life is an ordering of matter on a local scale. In the process of life making life, the net entropy of the universe increases more.
(December 28, 2017 at 7:52 am)Cyberman Wrote: Locally, at the cost of increasing entropy somewhere else. Such as the big hydrogen/helium reactor in the sky.
Hi y'all! I was wondering if you could explain more about life increasing entropy. Cyberman, your statement could be interpreted that the decrease in entropy is balanced by an increase somewhere else while Fireball seems to be claiming that life increases the entropy of the whole universe. Which is right?
Does life accelerate the decay of the universe? If so, what is the mechanism for that?
Or does the organization that is life come at the balancing cost of disorganization? If so, why is that necessary? It's hard for me to picture that, because I organized some words on a screen, some aspect of the universe suddenly and obediently fell apart (apologies to any civilizations suffering abrupt bridge collapses lol). And I know from regular experience that cleaning the house doesn't make it dirtier. Order creating disorder isn't very intuitive to me.
Clarity on this subject is appreciated!
Also...
Which came first; life or the entropy reduction? Life seems to be a product of organization, so I'd guess that order came first but then how does a collection of dumb stuff, that is supposed to obey the laws of thermodynamics, manage to organize itself to produce life? Seems like circular causation because if the mindless stuff did manage to organize, then it would already be evidence of life.
See:
To Lovelock, the basic question was “What is life, and how should it be recognized?” When speaking about this issue with some of his colleagues at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, he was asked what he would do to look for life on Mars. To this, Lovelock replied "I’d look for an entropy reduction, since this must be a general characteristic of life." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_an...ve_entropy
Quote:Also, which god are we talking about? How did it do these things?
How do we issue the commands to tell our fingers to type? Is it the result of a kind of code programmed by happenstance into the universe that is mindlessly followed, like a machine, that generates the decisions we think we make? If so, then why are we needed to be conscious just to helplessly watch the show? And how does mindless code-following generate consciousness? What evolutionary advantage would conscious code-following have over the robotic code-followers? What use would consciousness have if decisions were predetermined? Why would something evolve with so much refinement, yet have no interaction with reality?
Alternatively, do we have free will? What is that? Where did it come from, what is it made of, and how does it work?
If we can't even know how we do things, is it reasonable to ask how a god-like thing operates?
Maybe, at best, the existence of a god can be inferred... like dark matter.
Although dark matter has not been directly observed, its existence and properties are inferred from its gravitational effects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_matter
Then again, we've been inferring for millennia in lieu of better explanations at the time.
