Life as a manifestation of the second law of thermodynamics - A Layman Review (Or a start anyway)
Not much has changed in my life lately since my last blog post other than being more discouraged at keeping fit because I slacked off after going on a very short vacation/funeral. It's so hard to get back into it, especially when you're not seeing very good results as an old "dude", a term I use because I'd still like to think I'm somewhat 'with it' and besides it's more fitting of my youthful looks, as some have mentioned, a quality I feel is just as much a negative as a positive as greater age, or aesthetic maturity or whathaveyou, tends to garner greater respect. Anyhow, as an old dude who's almost always been very slim, had a bad back since my early 20s, tends to end workouts early sometimes because of anxiety (being nervous and shaky with weights over your head isn't advised) and what I'd suspect is a very lackluster endocrine system, workout results are just as lackluster.
But in other news, since my internet is having the same off/on relationship as I am with fitness, I finally got around to reading something more topical to my typical blog post from real scientists, or academics at least, and not crazies as myself so I'd like to add a bit of commentary to what I've already read. Anyway, the thesis is titled Life as a Manifestation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics by E. D. Schneider and J. J. Kay. And again, I have to admit as I've explained several times that I like to stay somewhat scientifically naive and discover these things by my own observations, preferably. As an anecdote, when you study a subject and do so in a very rigorous scientific manner, you can take so many rabbit holes and explore them to vast depths as many scientists do but it's so easy to get lost in details that you lose track of the big picture like a puzzle. At the molecular level, it might not be easy if at all possible to piece a puzzle together as the molecules leave little trace of mechanical joinery but at the macro scale, it's a lot easier to see where the pieces go. I can afford to do this because I'm not a scientist and don't care so much if people think I'm crazy so I don't have as much issue with taking more logical leaps. I think this is where Turing's Halting Problem can be applicable as well. You'll inevitably find yourself down many rabbit holes in trying to piece together puzzles and if you want to analyze the problem in a very testable scientific way, you'll have to explore these axiomatic rabbit holes to deeper depth than you'd casually be afforded, otherwise. But as a casual observer you are privileged to ask yourself if the rabbit hole is an impossible or infinite problem or is it just a hard one to get out of? You can then conveniently explore a bit more or exit them after deciding you've got all the information you may need and move on to the next before you drown in a seemingly infinite and perhaps less relevant part of a bigger and perhaps more vague problem that's not set on a budget or has to have practical benefit other than to just purely satiate curiosity. Of course I'm also just making excuses for me being stubborn and impatient; I've generally been one to try to find things out for myself at the cost of sometimes looking like a fool. Anyhow, let's have a look, shall we?
"Nonliving organized systems (like convection cells, tornados and lasers) and living systems (from cells to ecosystems) are dependent on outside energy fluxes to maintain their organization in a locally reduced entropy state."
My vocabulary differs than theirs here but admittedly they use more accurate and credible vocabulary but I think the phenomenon they mention here relates to what I mentioned about an optimal system needing fed entropy bits, or a small amount of chaos, to maintain order.
"The dynamics of the system are such that it becomes more and more difficult to move the system away from equilibrium (that is, proportionally more available work must be expended for each incremental increase in gradient as the system gets further from equilibrium, i.e., AT increases)."
I immediately thought of the Champion's Paradox, relativity theory or aerodynamics in that as you approach theoretical limits, the amount of energy required increases exponentially. Or...
"The thermodynamic principle which governs the behaviour of systems is that, as they are moved away from equilibrium they will utilize all avenues available to counter the applied gradients. As the applied gradients increase, so does the system’s ability to oppose further movement from equilibrium. "
"The reformulated second law suggests that as systems are moved away from equilibrium they will take advantage of all available means to resist externally applied gradients. When highly ordered complex systems emerge, they develop and grow at the expense of increasing the disorder at higher levels in the system’s hierarchy. We note that this behaviour appears universally in physical and chemical systems. We present a paradigm which provides for a thermodynamically consistent explanation of why there is life, including the origin of life, biological growth, the development of ecosystems, and patterns of biological evolution observed in the fossil record."
"The more a system is moved from equilibrium, the more sophisticated its mechanisms for resisting being moved from equilibrium."
An object at rest tends to stay at rest. Or picturing it as elementary particles... particles at rest, when moved by other particles, you'll have some which may react more synchronously and allow some energy transfer but you'll inevitably create turbulence where these forces converge and more turbulence means more resistance, less energy transferred, more lost. Time, energy and mass relate here as you have a sort of non-Newtonian fluid type of exchange where the more energy you put in inversely to time, the more resistance you get. Or on the sociological scale as with the Champion's Paradox, the more you push, the more externalities push back at an exponential rate; more power creates more power targeted towards the bearer.
"Prigogine and his colleagues have shown that dissipative structures self-organize through fluctuations, small instabilities which lead to irreversible bifurcations and new stable system states. Thus, the future states of such systems are not deterministic. Dissipative structures are stable over a finite range of conditions and are sensitive to fluxes and flows from outside the system. Glansdorff and Prigogine 1191 have shown that these thermodynamic relationships are best represented by coupled nonlinear relationships, i.e., autocatalytic positive feedback cycles, many of which lead to stable macroscopic structures which exist away from the equilibrium state. Convection cells, hurricanes, autocatalytic chemical reactions, and living systems are all examples of far-from-equilibrium dissipative structures which exhibit coherent behavior."
And through the eyes of thermodynamics, religion, morality, ethics, spirituality and other more abstracted way-seeking systems, of those I'd argue that they aren't necessarily about taking the path of least resistance but the path of most optimal resistance towards preservation of the system. And in keeping with the increased information, physical and such forms of entropy, our way-seeking systems inevitably change according to the path of most optimal resistance. And before we get too self-righteous, I think we can accurately say that this model is more descriptive rather than prescriptive. Using this model to base your religious views off of is sort of like saying that if I hit you and you hit me back that it's in accordance with Newton's classical laws instead of taking into account psychology (your background and how you're feeling that day), medicine (how you register pain) and other such subsets of physics. Yes, I'm a physics elitest and materialist; I believe physics reigns supreme in modeling our universe, both macro and micro, and no matter how much you want to imagine that your imagination reigns supreme in your solipsistic fantasies, physics don't care.
On another note, I'm wanting to see consciousness as just predictive analysis and that pain, pleasure and other such emotions happen to such degrees with conscious entities because we can pre-emptively stray from the natural thermodynamic flow to some extent and so these mechanisms have evolutionarily become our guides; they represent this resistance to take the path of least optimal gradient degradation. Although admittedly things are very murky when sometimes a painful decision can be an evolutionarily good thing and pleasure can sometimes be counter but we're, of course, not perfectly efficient dissipators so some energy is inevitably lost. But I don't see unconscious entities being beholden to these complex characteristics as they naturally directly flow with the thermodynamic tides. And it's probably no coincidence that we see more intelligent animals, those with more predictive capabilities, as being more receptive to pain and therefore we tend to be more sympathetic to their conditions.
"The gradient reducing nature of self-organizing systems is dramatically demonstrated by a simple experimental device sold as a toy in a nationwide scientific catalog (Edmunds). Their “Tornado in a Bottle” (not to be confused with “fusion in a bottle”) consists of a simple plastic orifice that allows the connection of two 1.5 liter plastic soda bottles end to end. The bottles are connected and set on a level surface to drain with the upper bottle filled with water and the lower bottle empty. When set vertical, a thirty centimeter gradient of water exists. Due to the orifice configuration, the bottle drains slowly, requiring approximately six minutes to empty the upper bottle (i.e., to reduce the gradient in the system). The experiment is then repeated with the bottles being given a slight rotational perturbation. A vortex forms, driven by the gravitational gradient within the system, and drains the upper bottle in approximately 11 seconds. The “tornado,” a highly organized structure, has the ability to dissipate the gradient much faster, thus bringing the system to its local equilibrium more quickly! Here again is a manifestation of the restated second law, a macroscopic highly organized structure of 1O23 molecules acting coherently to dissipate a gradient. The production of the highly organized system, the tornado, leads to more effective dissipation of the larger driving gradient, the gravitational differences in water levels between the bottles. As in the Benard convection experiments, organized structures reduce gradients more quickly than random linear processes."
Could this also be the Great Filter? If intelligence is indicative of a highly organized system which can dissipate gradients more optimally, gradients that the ordered system itself depends on to exist, perhaps this optimal dissipation rate is a Great limit on intelligence, or complex systems, and why we may not receive signal of other intelligent life out there. Well, other than your cousin JimBob who saw a UFO one drunken night. Ok, I can't totally disregard UFOs; I want to believe, like rooting for the other team, to witness a self-defeat, that someone or something is better than you, is to also realize a greater potential of intelligent life. Perhaps complex life dies by its own sword as I've speculated before. The more power acquired, the more power to self-destruct with decreasing tolerance of mistakes; Champion's Paradox rears its ugly head again.
Considering how deficited my attention is at the moment, I'd say that's all for now, folks. Most of what I've read so far makes sense to me although there's certain parts where I'm unclear on. But my attention span and impatience have always been an Achille's Heel. I've picked up somewhat on their vocabulary and when I previously spoke of life depending on this contrast of "high" and "low" entropy, perhaps it's better to use their terms and just refer to them as a wholly gradient thermodynamic system. Or maybe this may be the last you hear of me on this subject. This all does my brain in and I feel someone far more intelligent than I is better off obsessing over these things. But I'll probably continue and maybe even go a bit madder, who knows. Ever since I've had a schizo-affective episode, I went through a weird obsession with infinity, having nightmares of it, probably indicative of being tired of life and afraid that it'd go on forever. After that it was this vision of the Mandelbrot Set covered in a documentary by Arthur C. Clarke, naturally, as it could be ran for infinite iterations and display this beautiful pattern and of course taught me that complexity, or seeming, can be wrought from simplicity and our world, as complex as it may be, may have some sort of elegant simplicity behind it all. That's another argument against those who argue that intelligent life must arise by vastly more intelligence, or by gods. Or just look at my children, intelligent life spurred from not-so-intelligent life. But anyway, even before those, there was a religious obsession as sometimes happens when you go mad, and so I began to vigorously study and debate online with other Christians and those filthy heathen atheists. Of course it took a few years before I eventually turned to the dark side.
After that I gradually and casually started getting into more science-y reading where I eventually got my head stuck on seeing the world through elementary particles. Do you see a theme here? Whatever interesting knowledge I pick up I can't sometimes help but utilize it as eyewear for which I re-analyze everything though the new lenses. And yes, waves do exist but waves are just the emanations of bigger particles, points in time/space, I'd argue, and the emanations themselves, fields in some cases, are composed of smaller particles. Now I can't prove this but I can conveniently play the layman here since this isn't a science journal and so can make stupid assumptions without having to scientifically prove it. Through this particle lens is just how I've been obsessively seeing things for the past decade, at least. It all started with wondering how gravity might work on the particle level. After noticing how cereal tends to be drawn towards each other in milk, a completely different phenomenon, I got to wondering about how oscillating particles in a fluid would behave. I came across some 18th century research of a Norwegian scientist, Dr. Bjerknes, who observed, or so I understood at the time although not very accurately, that oscillating spheres in a fluid repel or attract depending on frequency and amplitude, sort of like the Bernoulli Principle. So I got to wondering if this could explain gravity. If you take somewhat like particles, they will attract and with greater attractive force these particles will synchronize more readily, the frequency of each will be averaged out to conform to the whole, and with this greater synchronicity and greater numbers comes greater amplitude, sort of analogous to combining a bunch of low-volume speakers playing the same note at once, you get greater volume. And so a gravitational mass, I'd like to think, is due to particles, at least some of them resonating at like frequencies. The main characteristic of particles is their resonant frequency and amplitude so in this regard, I see a vague likeness to String Theory, even if I'm not intelligent enough to understand the mathematics of it and to music theory. I see the universe as kind of a vast orchestra of players, some playing the same symphony, some not, some out of tune or playing something wholly inharmonious. And to run with that, I've probably been out of tune with the rest of the local orchestra a lot of my life.
Of course this could all just be a bunch of hullabaloo because I'm the first to admit I intentionally try not to put myself in scientific rabbit holes that will be difficult to get out in my lifetime for the sake of trying to figure out as much as possible, at this scale of the puzzle and at this junction (Thanks for this phrase, Winnebago Man), as I have time and interest to do.
And to sign off, rest in peace David Berman. Whether it be Pavement, the Silver Jews, Purple Mountain, your calm tenor voice backed by twangish guitars and Gen-X apathy really resonated with me. And as far as lyrics go, I rarely pay attention since as I usually see it, if I want a good story or hear great philosophical musings, I'd turn to the respective disciplines but Berman had a way with words and you couldn't help but listen.
But in other news, since my internet is having the same off/on relationship as I am with fitness, I finally got around to reading something more topical to my typical blog post from real scientists, or academics at least, and not crazies as myself so I'd like to add a bit of commentary to what I've already read. Anyway, the thesis is titled Life as a Manifestation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics by E. D. Schneider and J. J. Kay. And again, I have to admit as I've explained several times that I like to stay somewhat scientifically naive and discover these things by my own observations, preferably. As an anecdote, when you study a subject and do so in a very rigorous scientific manner, you can take so many rabbit holes and explore them to vast depths as many scientists do but it's so easy to get lost in details that you lose track of the big picture like a puzzle. At the molecular level, it might not be easy if at all possible to piece a puzzle together as the molecules leave little trace of mechanical joinery but at the macro scale, it's a lot easier to see where the pieces go. I can afford to do this because I'm not a scientist and don't care so much if people think I'm crazy so I don't have as much issue with taking more logical leaps. I think this is where Turing's Halting Problem can be applicable as well. You'll inevitably find yourself down many rabbit holes in trying to piece together puzzles and if you want to analyze the problem in a very testable scientific way, you'll have to explore these axiomatic rabbit holes to deeper depth than you'd casually be afforded, otherwise. But as a casual observer you are privileged to ask yourself if the rabbit hole is an impossible or infinite problem or is it just a hard one to get out of? You can then conveniently explore a bit more or exit them after deciding you've got all the information you may need and move on to the next before you drown in a seemingly infinite and perhaps less relevant part of a bigger and perhaps more vague problem that's not set on a budget or has to have practical benefit other than to just purely satiate curiosity. Of course I'm also just making excuses for me being stubborn and impatient; I've generally been one to try to find things out for myself at the cost of sometimes looking like a fool. Anyhow, let's have a look, shall we?
"Nonliving organized systems (like convection cells, tornados and lasers) and living systems (from cells to ecosystems) are dependent on outside energy fluxes to maintain their organization in a locally reduced entropy state."
My vocabulary differs than theirs here but admittedly they use more accurate and credible vocabulary but I think the phenomenon they mention here relates to what I mentioned about an optimal system needing fed entropy bits, or a small amount of chaos, to maintain order.
"The dynamics of the system are such that it becomes more and more difficult to move the system away from equilibrium (that is, proportionally more available work must be expended for each incremental increase in gradient as the system gets further from equilibrium, i.e., AT increases)."
I immediately thought of the Champion's Paradox, relativity theory or aerodynamics in that as you approach theoretical limits, the amount of energy required increases exponentially. Or...
"The thermodynamic principle which governs the behaviour of systems is that, as they are moved away from equilibrium they will utilize all avenues available to counter the applied gradients. As the applied gradients increase, so does the system’s ability to oppose further movement from equilibrium. "
"The reformulated second law suggests that as systems are moved away from equilibrium they will take advantage of all available means to resist externally applied gradients. When highly ordered complex systems emerge, they develop and grow at the expense of increasing the disorder at higher levels in the system’s hierarchy. We note that this behaviour appears universally in physical and chemical systems. We present a paradigm which provides for a thermodynamically consistent explanation of why there is life, including the origin of life, biological growth, the development of ecosystems, and patterns of biological evolution observed in the fossil record."
"The more a system is moved from equilibrium, the more sophisticated its mechanisms for resisting being moved from equilibrium."
An object at rest tends to stay at rest. Or picturing it as elementary particles... particles at rest, when moved by other particles, you'll have some which may react more synchronously and allow some energy transfer but you'll inevitably create turbulence where these forces converge and more turbulence means more resistance, less energy transferred, more lost. Time, energy and mass relate here as you have a sort of non-Newtonian fluid type of exchange where the more energy you put in inversely to time, the more resistance you get. Or on the sociological scale as with the Champion's Paradox, the more you push, the more externalities push back at an exponential rate; more power creates more power targeted towards the bearer.
"Prigogine and his colleagues have shown that dissipative structures self-organize through fluctuations, small instabilities which lead to irreversible bifurcations and new stable system states. Thus, the future states of such systems are not deterministic. Dissipative structures are stable over a finite range of conditions and are sensitive to fluxes and flows from outside the system. Glansdorff and Prigogine 1191 have shown that these thermodynamic relationships are best represented by coupled nonlinear relationships, i.e., autocatalytic positive feedback cycles, many of which lead to stable macroscopic structures which exist away from the equilibrium state. Convection cells, hurricanes, autocatalytic chemical reactions, and living systems are all examples of far-from-equilibrium dissipative structures which exhibit coherent behavior."
And through the eyes of thermodynamics, religion, morality, ethics, spirituality and other more abstracted way-seeking systems, of those I'd argue that they aren't necessarily about taking the path of least resistance but the path of most optimal resistance towards preservation of the system. And in keeping with the increased information, physical and such forms of entropy, our way-seeking systems inevitably change according to the path of most optimal resistance. And before we get too self-righteous, I think we can accurately say that this model is more descriptive rather than prescriptive. Using this model to base your religious views off of is sort of like saying that if I hit you and you hit me back that it's in accordance with Newton's classical laws instead of taking into account psychology (your background and how you're feeling that day), medicine (how you register pain) and other such subsets of physics. Yes, I'm a physics elitest and materialist; I believe physics reigns supreme in modeling our universe, both macro and micro, and no matter how much you want to imagine that your imagination reigns supreme in your solipsistic fantasies, physics don't care.
On another note, I'm wanting to see consciousness as just predictive analysis and that pain, pleasure and other such emotions happen to such degrees with conscious entities because we can pre-emptively stray from the natural thermodynamic flow to some extent and so these mechanisms have evolutionarily become our guides; they represent this resistance to take the path of least optimal gradient degradation. Although admittedly things are very murky when sometimes a painful decision can be an evolutionarily good thing and pleasure can sometimes be counter but we're, of course, not perfectly efficient dissipators so some energy is inevitably lost. But I don't see unconscious entities being beholden to these complex characteristics as they naturally directly flow with the thermodynamic tides. And it's probably no coincidence that we see more intelligent animals, those with more predictive capabilities, as being more receptive to pain and therefore we tend to be more sympathetic to their conditions.
"The gradient reducing nature of self-organizing systems is dramatically demonstrated by a simple experimental device sold as a toy in a nationwide scientific catalog (Edmunds). Their “Tornado in a Bottle” (not to be confused with “fusion in a bottle”) consists of a simple plastic orifice that allows the connection of two 1.5 liter plastic soda bottles end to end. The bottles are connected and set on a level surface to drain with the upper bottle filled with water and the lower bottle empty. When set vertical, a thirty centimeter gradient of water exists. Due to the orifice configuration, the bottle drains slowly, requiring approximately six minutes to empty the upper bottle (i.e., to reduce the gradient in the system). The experiment is then repeated with the bottles being given a slight rotational perturbation. A vortex forms, driven by the gravitational gradient within the system, and drains the upper bottle in approximately 11 seconds. The “tornado,” a highly organized structure, has the ability to dissipate the gradient much faster, thus bringing the system to its local equilibrium more quickly! Here again is a manifestation of the restated second law, a macroscopic highly organized structure of 1O23 molecules acting coherently to dissipate a gradient. The production of the highly organized system, the tornado, leads to more effective dissipation of the larger driving gradient, the gravitational differences in water levels between the bottles. As in the Benard convection experiments, organized structures reduce gradients more quickly than random linear processes."
Could this also be the Great Filter? If intelligence is indicative of a highly organized system which can dissipate gradients more optimally, gradients that the ordered system itself depends on to exist, perhaps this optimal dissipation rate is a Great limit on intelligence, or complex systems, and why we may not receive signal of other intelligent life out there. Well, other than your cousin JimBob who saw a UFO one drunken night. Ok, I can't totally disregard UFOs; I want to believe, like rooting for the other team, to witness a self-defeat, that someone or something is better than you, is to also realize a greater potential of intelligent life. Perhaps complex life dies by its own sword as I've speculated before. The more power acquired, the more power to self-destruct with decreasing tolerance of mistakes; Champion's Paradox rears its ugly head again.
Considering how deficited my attention is at the moment, I'd say that's all for now, folks. Most of what I've read so far makes sense to me although there's certain parts where I'm unclear on. But my attention span and impatience have always been an Achille's Heel. I've picked up somewhat on their vocabulary and when I previously spoke of life depending on this contrast of "high" and "low" entropy, perhaps it's better to use their terms and just refer to them as a wholly gradient thermodynamic system. Or maybe this may be the last you hear of me on this subject. This all does my brain in and I feel someone far more intelligent than I is better off obsessing over these things. But I'll probably continue and maybe even go a bit madder, who knows. Ever since I've had a schizo-affective episode, I went through a weird obsession with infinity, having nightmares of it, probably indicative of being tired of life and afraid that it'd go on forever. After that it was this vision of the Mandelbrot Set covered in a documentary by Arthur C. Clarke, naturally, as it could be ran for infinite iterations and display this beautiful pattern and of course taught me that complexity, or seeming, can be wrought from simplicity and our world, as complex as it may be, may have some sort of elegant simplicity behind it all. That's another argument against those who argue that intelligent life must arise by vastly more intelligence, or by gods. Or just look at my children, intelligent life spurred from not-so-intelligent life. But anyway, even before those, there was a religious obsession as sometimes happens when you go mad, and so I began to vigorously study and debate online with other Christians and those filthy heathen atheists. Of course it took a few years before I eventually turned to the dark side.
After that I gradually and casually started getting into more science-y reading where I eventually got my head stuck on seeing the world through elementary particles. Do you see a theme here? Whatever interesting knowledge I pick up I can't sometimes help but utilize it as eyewear for which I re-analyze everything though the new lenses. And yes, waves do exist but waves are just the emanations of bigger particles, points in time/space, I'd argue, and the emanations themselves, fields in some cases, are composed of smaller particles. Now I can't prove this but I can conveniently play the layman here since this isn't a science journal and so can make stupid assumptions without having to scientifically prove it. Through this particle lens is just how I've been obsessively seeing things for the past decade, at least. It all started with wondering how gravity might work on the particle level. After noticing how cereal tends to be drawn towards each other in milk, a completely different phenomenon, I got to wondering about how oscillating particles in a fluid would behave. I came across some 18th century research of a Norwegian scientist, Dr. Bjerknes, who observed, or so I understood at the time although not very accurately, that oscillating spheres in a fluid repel or attract depending on frequency and amplitude, sort of like the Bernoulli Principle. So I got to wondering if this could explain gravity. If you take somewhat like particles, they will attract and with greater attractive force these particles will synchronize more readily, the frequency of each will be averaged out to conform to the whole, and with this greater synchronicity and greater numbers comes greater amplitude, sort of analogous to combining a bunch of low-volume speakers playing the same note at once, you get greater volume. And so a gravitational mass, I'd like to think, is due to particles, at least some of them resonating at like frequencies. The main characteristic of particles is their resonant frequency and amplitude so in this regard, I see a vague likeness to String Theory, even if I'm not intelligent enough to understand the mathematics of it and to music theory. I see the universe as kind of a vast orchestra of players, some playing the same symphony, some not, some out of tune or playing something wholly inharmonious. And to run with that, I've probably been out of tune with the rest of the local orchestra a lot of my life.
Of course this could all just be a bunch of hullabaloo because I'm the first to admit I intentionally try not to put myself in scientific rabbit holes that will be difficult to get out in my lifetime for the sake of trying to figure out as much as possible, at this scale of the puzzle and at this junction (Thanks for this phrase, Winnebago Man), as I have time and interest to do.
And to sign off, rest in peace David Berman. Whether it be Pavement, the Silver Jews, Purple Mountain, your calm tenor voice backed by twangish guitars and Gen-X apathy really resonated with me. And as far as lyrics go, I rarely pay attention since as I usually see it, if I want a good story or hear great philosophical musings, I'd turn to the respective disciplines but Berman had a way with words and you couldn't help but listen.
"Friends are warmer than gold when you're old.
And keeping them is harder than you might suppose.
Lately, I tend to make strangers wherever I go.
Some of them were once people I was happy to know."
Oh, and I can't let you go without hearing another recent favorite:
Oh, and I can't let you go without hearing another recent favorite:
I know, it's such a pity party here:
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