I wouldn't say that life is "anti-entropic". It's more like life is surfing the entropy gradient, creating local, temporary order against entropy's pull. Life's goal is not to beat back entropy in some meaningful way; it's to *leverage* it to create metastable localized order.
As to the word "capitalism", it's been conclusively beaten into new shape along with "liberalism" and "democracy" and "fascism" and dozens others. I mourn the loss of its original meaning - that "capital" has different modalities and pathologies from "labor" and thus an economic predominance of capital changes society's structure. Instead it's turned into an amalgam of capital order and market-something and government interventionism, and - alongside "liberalism" - became a team marker in an ideological war, losing all descriptive power. This robs us of the langage to discuss fairly consequential matters, such to what extent capital requires and shapes markets (and vice versa).
“It's more like life is surfing the entropy gradient, creating local, temporary order against entropy's pull. Life's goal is not to beat back entropy in some meaningful way; it's to *leverage* it to create metastable localized order.” What a fascinating construction: will think on this.
Societies with high levels of capital work very differently than societies with low levels. The forms and distributions of capital also matter. All worth discussing, I just want to ensure that information landscapes are taken seriously, including risk, coordination problems, search, etc.
First, I concur on the distortions of language with the use of words like capitalism. As we lose the orginal and distinct meaning, we end up adding adjectives to modify and clarify and explain what we "really mean". Then life and language are just made more complex.
On "life's goal", my view is life's goal is simply and only to continue to preserve and continue "LIFE". With our natural selection outlook, that form of life that is more "anti-entropic" and "order producing" (or "order capturing") is more likely to succeed at this than forms that are less "anti-entropic".
Yes, the *functional* purpose of life is more life, a self-organization of a universe whose natural laws statistically predispose it to produce it. (The moral purpose is whatever we choose to make it.)
My problem with the term "anti-entropic" is that it implies a frontal opposition that does not in fact exist. Frontally opposing entropy is less adapted (and thus less successful) than "burning" entropy - massive life is actually increasing the entropy of the universe, as a necessary price of its continued existence. In other words, life is a local aberration of the universal state; it cannot "take over" the universe.
1) The entropy gradient applies to non-biological objects - planets rotate around stars, nuclear fusion happens within stars, water evaporates, rain falls, rivers flow downhill. However, even here there are always spontaneous temporary states with lower local entropy (which have a characteristic of gradual local low-entropy decay).
Biological organisms surely use the entropy gradient, but it is a qualitatively different processes than sliding down the gradient. "Surfing" the entropy gradient quip is a quip "too far", as entropy itself is not driving anything, entropy is accounting of degree of order and disorder - energetically or structurally; you can surf the energy gradient though - just like surfing the ocean wave. Life uses excess energy - like in examples of under-ocean volcanic vents bringing chemical energy in the form of sulfur compounds, or solar radiation photons in the case of sunlight - and essentially acts as a Maxwell demon, using it to reorganize molecules into extremely elaborate organic chemistry structures. Life actually locally accelerates overall entropy (dissipates energy slightly more than otherwise, although compared to the Universe's energy flows the degree is not even a rounding error of a rounding error of a rounding error) on an available radiative or chemical energy gradient, in order to build and maintain stable biological organism states (persisting and maintaining such states, with a characteristic catastrophic local entropy - loss of organization - increase in death).
Lorenzo says "life", not merely organisms, exactly because while, say, blue-green algae or plants could live on their own and deplete available living space and mineral resources, other types of Maxwell demons - bacteria, animals, or parasitic plants - use the accumulated energy of low-organizational-entropy represented in organisms harnessing photons from the sun, and then further (up/down) the food-chain organisms maintain their low-organizational-entropy state. Thus they provide the background for the evolution - adaptation and selection - in the vast numbers of organisms culminating at the moment in Homo sapiens, and ultimately lead to another qualitatively different evolution - cultural evolution.
Yes, contrary to self-destructive lefties finding another religion in the "ecosystem," Homo as The Ape that Understood the Universe is the pinnacle of Earth cognitive and cultural evolution. If one wanted a religion, that would be a religion I can sign under. Not midwits or primitives worshiping of the ecosystem, leading to the climate change cargo cult, net zero, and other subcults. So, Lorenzo's "Life is how purpose gets into the universe" is correct on many levels - in this case truly having anti-entropic "purpose."
Being a formerly working experimental and then theoretical physicist, and currently working molecular geneticist/biologist (as a number of physicists tend to translate themselves to interesting to them fields), I enjoyed how "anti-entropic" statement ruffled my prim feathers in the first reading too, and after digesting it, I thought: what a great thought provoking quip! Thus, I for one approve the word play "anti-entropic" as clever and illuminating in this context. You don't need to agree, of course.
2) While it is comfortable for lefties to operate within the derogatory definitions they create (hence the proliferation of -isms and -phobias), there isn't descriptive power but rather dismissive-derogatory power. Same with "capitalism". I was skeptical about this term for a long time - because even Marx himself did not invent it nor use it; he had a rudimentary and simplistic concept of "capital". However, within his lifetime other "Marxists" started to use the derogatory term - to put normal people on the back foot and force them to defend against the malignant utopians' definitions, rather than rejecting them - as Lorenzo is doing with his uncommon insight.
This is an excellent and thoughtful essay, Lorenzo. I find it thorough yet brief.
Let me just focus on two pieces worth attention. This is a most insightful sentence which duly takes its own paragraph:
"Life is how purpose gets into the universe." This is absolutely it!!!
I would like to juxtapose it with an excellent video interview with Richard Miniter, "The Truth about 9/11", closer to the end of the essay. This is a deep interview where, in the first 2/3 or so, Miniter shows the psychological need of the downwardly mobile - in this case Saudi young intelligent people - which ended up with them as terrorists, and finds them identical to Mamdani nepo babies. Brilliant insights.
So, eventually the interview got to the point of meaning, and this is where, for me, they lost their credibility and led me to wonder what else they have simplified or Pollyanna'd. And that is John Papola professing his faith in the Catholic Church giving him and his friends meaning and purpose, and Miniter agrees. And here we hit the point where it becomes understood that biological/genetic evolution is not on their radar, at least in this interview. Thus, everything rotates on the political-cultural level. And thus things can come and go, because all people are essentially equal. This reflects on their view of immigration; I will not go deeper here, as Lorenzo covered it in depth in many essays with which I agree.
The point is Miniter correctly places modern wokism on the same level as religious fervor of a few hundred years ago - or any time in the last 10K years, or maybe even 100K years really - as a built-in instinct for religiosity. That is the instinct for people to believe strongly in something irrational that would distinguish them from another tribe and allow them to defend themselves from their "evil" and go on a crusade (or whatever) to slaughter them. And of course it has a deep emotional root in us humans, and how would one expect it to present itself in our qualia? Of course not as us feeling evil and driven by our evil to kill and torture and enslave others, but rather as we being the best people following the best god who gives us purpose in life to defend our god and makes us exalted in communion with this god. And if we don't eliminate the "evil" doers, the god surely will punish us for letting the degeneracy spread. I am simplifying it for brevity, so I am not going to engage in prolonged arguments about details. The point is that in Malthusian competition it was extremely adaptive instinct, also serving ecological balancing and evolutionary role, allowing the more organized tribe prevail; and what is a better way to organize than a shared beliefs differing from beliefs of others. At least on larger scale, this is why the rise of Big Gods with advent of kingdoms; on smaller scale often a family grudge would be enough for a vendetta. And I am not being derogatory toward religiosity - it is what it is; this is our evolutionary adaptation, for better or worse.
And I have sympathy for Papola's hope; it would be nice if muscular Catholicism could counter wokism or Islam. However, what we see since the time of Nietzsche is that God in its medieval form is dead and cannot be brought back by fiat (or I hope not; it would be another theocracy). And, there is too much real knowledge - science and technology. Particularly since wokism is really a descendant set of memes and instincts of Christianity = WEIRD people at its root - all humans are equal, the last will be the first - and Christianity, and particularly Catholicism, in conjunction with proto-Marxism and post-Marxism, are the roots of all the zeal of guilt and self-loathing and "our mortal sin" of existence. Oh, spare me. Isn't that why we have a Marxist pope now, who spent time in mostly Marxist Catholicism in South America?
I will leave it at Lorenzo's saying: "Life is how purpose gets into the universe."
"That is the instinct for people to believe strongly in something irrational that would distinguish them from another tribe and allow them to defend themselves from their "evil" and go on a crusade (or whatever) to slaughter them. And of course it has a deep emotional root in us humans, and how would one expect it to present itself in our qualia?"
{...} "And I am not being derogatory toward religiosity - it is what it is; this is our evolutionary adaptation, for better or worse."
So it seems the irrational and emotional aspects of our nature provide the "cement" or "glue" that holds (or grabs) our logical and rational capabilities and (perhaps) points them towards whatever we consider a valid and valuable purpose. I just wonder if we cast our minds to 30K to 300K years or more into the future, will we find that we are evolving to enhance one aspect over the other to further enhance our prospects for survival? I would like to think the logical side is gaining ground. But that is probably just an emotional response on my part. :-)
ssri, I sincerely hope so too. I really enjoy Lorenzo's points about biological life being anti-entropic. However, with higher prosperity, human evolution tends to go dysgenic - the buildup of disease frequency and low fertility of high-intelligence individuals (as happened in Rome...) and "spiteful mutants" as a result. The only way out of it would be somehow gradually increasing wisdom and intelligence and health. Perhaps IVF selection - and some other approaches we don't have yet - will gradually lead to it all. Perhaps a society with an average IQ of the current 140 and slightly more positive character traits on average would bootstrap a positive, stable humanity? Just to make sure, I never imply the autistic guys' transhumanist nonsense. But you are right, the current trend leads to another kind of dark ages, so your 30K years - after a few dark ages - or 300K years - after a couple of glacial periods - is more likely. I share your emotion that hopefully all the "red in tooth and claw" in between will be worth it somehow.
A brilliant piece. I will enjoy reading all the links. You have openend my eyes
Thank you for al that hard work Lorenzo.
I wouldn't say that life is "anti-entropic". It's more like life is surfing the entropy gradient, creating local, temporary order against entropy's pull. Life's goal is not to beat back entropy in some meaningful way; it's to *leverage* it to create metastable localized order.
As to the word "capitalism", it's been conclusively beaten into new shape along with "liberalism" and "democracy" and "fascism" and dozens others. I mourn the loss of its original meaning - that "capital" has different modalities and pathologies from "labor" and thus an economic predominance of capital changes society's structure. Instead it's turned into an amalgam of capital order and market-something and government interventionism, and - alongside "liberalism" - became a team marker in an ideological war, losing all descriptive power. This robs us of the langage to discuss fairly consequential matters, such to what extent capital requires and shapes markets (and vice versa).
“It's more like life is surfing the entropy gradient, creating local, temporary order against entropy's pull. Life's goal is not to beat back entropy in some meaningful way; it's to *leverage* it to create metastable localized order.” What a fascinating construction: will think on this.
Societies with high levels of capital work very differently than societies with low levels. The forms and distributions of capital also matter. All worth discussing, I just want to ensure that information landscapes are taken seriously, including risk, coordination problems, search, etc.
First, I concur on the distortions of language with the use of words like capitalism. As we lose the orginal and distinct meaning, we end up adding adjectives to modify and clarify and explain what we "really mean". Then life and language are just made more complex.
On "life's goal", my view is life's goal is simply and only to continue to preserve and continue "LIFE". With our natural selection outlook, that form of life that is more "anti-entropic" and "order producing" (or "order capturing") is more likely to succeed at this than forms that are less "anti-entropic".
Yes, the *functional* purpose of life is more life, a self-organization of a universe whose natural laws statistically predispose it to produce it. (The moral purpose is whatever we choose to make it.)
My problem with the term "anti-entropic" is that it implies a frontal opposition that does not in fact exist. Frontally opposing entropy is less adapted (and thus less successful) than "burning" entropy - massive life is actually increasing the entropy of the universe, as a necessary price of its continued existence. In other words, life is a local aberration of the universal state; it cannot "take over" the universe.
I don't see Lorenzo ever implying such a pointless thing as reversing entropy of the whole universe.
1) The entropy gradient applies to non-biological objects - planets rotate around stars, nuclear fusion happens within stars, water evaporates, rain falls, rivers flow downhill. However, even here there are always spontaneous temporary states with lower local entropy (which have a characteristic of gradual local low-entropy decay).
Biological organisms surely use the entropy gradient, but it is a qualitatively different processes than sliding down the gradient. "Surfing" the entropy gradient quip is a quip "too far", as entropy itself is not driving anything, entropy is accounting of degree of order and disorder - energetically or structurally; you can surf the energy gradient though - just like surfing the ocean wave. Life uses excess energy - like in examples of under-ocean volcanic vents bringing chemical energy in the form of sulfur compounds, or solar radiation photons in the case of sunlight - and essentially acts as a Maxwell demon, using it to reorganize molecules into extremely elaborate organic chemistry structures. Life actually locally accelerates overall entropy (dissipates energy slightly more than otherwise, although compared to the Universe's energy flows the degree is not even a rounding error of a rounding error of a rounding error) on an available radiative or chemical energy gradient, in order to build and maintain stable biological organism states (persisting and maintaining such states, with a characteristic catastrophic local entropy - loss of organization - increase in death).
Lorenzo says "life", not merely organisms, exactly because while, say, blue-green algae or plants could live on their own and deplete available living space and mineral resources, other types of Maxwell demons - bacteria, animals, or parasitic plants - use the accumulated energy of low-organizational-entropy represented in organisms harnessing photons from the sun, and then further (up/down) the food-chain organisms maintain their low-organizational-entropy state. Thus they provide the background for the evolution - adaptation and selection - in the vast numbers of organisms culminating at the moment in Homo sapiens, and ultimately lead to another qualitatively different evolution - cultural evolution.
Yes, contrary to self-destructive lefties finding another religion in the "ecosystem," Homo as The Ape that Understood the Universe is the pinnacle of Earth cognitive and cultural evolution. If one wanted a religion, that would be a religion I can sign under. Not midwits or primitives worshiping of the ecosystem, leading to the climate change cargo cult, net zero, and other subcults. So, Lorenzo's "Life is how purpose gets into the universe" is correct on many levels - in this case truly having anti-entropic "purpose."
Being a formerly working experimental and then theoretical physicist, and currently working molecular geneticist/biologist (as a number of physicists tend to translate themselves to interesting to them fields), I enjoyed how "anti-entropic" statement ruffled my prim feathers in the first reading too, and after digesting it, I thought: what a great thought provoking quip! Thus, I for one approve the word play "anti-entropic" as clever and illuminating in this context. You don't need to agree, of course.
2) While it is comfortable for lefties to operate within the derogatory definitions they create (hence the proliferation of -isms and -phobias), there isn't descriptive power but rather dismissive-derogatory power. Same with "capitalism". I was skeptical about this term for a long time - because even Marx himself did not invent it nor use it; he had a rudimentary and simplistic concept of "capital". However, within his lifetime other "Marxists" started to use the derogatory term - to put normal people on the back foot and force them to defend against the malignant utopians' definitions, rather than rejecting them - as Lorenzo is doing with his uncommon insight.
This is an excellent and thoughtful essay, Lorenzo. I find it thorough yet brief.
Let me just focus on two pieces worth attention. This is a most insightful sentence which duly takes its own paragraph:
"Life is how purpose gets into the universe." This is absolutely it!!!
I would like to juxtapose it with an excellent video interview with Richard Miniter, "The Truth about 9/11", closer to the end of the essay. This is a deep interview where, in the first 2/3 or so, Miniter shows the psychological need of the downwardly mobile - in this case Saudi young intelligent people - which ended up with them as terrorists, and finds them identical to Mamdani nepo babies. Brilliant insights.
So, eventually the interview got to the point of meaning, and this is where, for me, they lost their credibility and led me to wonder what else they have simplified or Pollyanna'd. And that is John Papola professing his faith in the Catholic Church giving him and his friends meaning and purpose, and Miniter agrees. And here we hit the point where it becomes understood that biological/genetic evolution is not on their radar, at least in this interview. Thus, everything rotates on the political-cultural level. And thus things can come and go, because all people are essentially equal. This reflects on their view of immigration; I will not go deeper here, as Lorenzo covered it in depth in many essays with which I agree.
The point is Miniter correctly places modern wokism on the same level as religious fervor of a few hundred years ago - or any time in the last 10K years, or maybe even 100K years really - as a built-in instinct for religiosity. That is the instinct for people to believe strongly in something irrational that would distinguish them from another tribe and allow them to defend themselves from their "evil" and go on a crusade (or whatever) to slaughter them. And of course it has a deep emotional root in us humans, and how would one expect it to present itself in our qualia? Of course not as us feeling evil and driven by our evil to kill and torture and enslave others, but rather as we being the best people following the best god who gives us purpose in life to defend our god and makes us exalted in communion with this god. And if we don't eliminate the "evil" doers, the god surely will punish us for letting the degeneracy spread. I am simplifying it for brevity, so I am not going to engage in prolonged arguments about details. The point is that in Malthusian competition it was extremely adaptive instinct, also serving ecological balancing and evolutionary role, allowing the more organized tribe prevail; and what is a better way to organize than a shared beliefs differing from beliefs of others. At least on larger scale, this is why the rise of Big Gods with advent of kingdoms; on smaller scale often a family grudge would be enough for a vendetta. And I am not being derogatory toward religiosity - it is what it is; this is our evolutionary adaptation, for better or worse.
And I have sympathy for Papola's hope; it would be nice if muscular Catholicism could counter wokism or Islam. However, what we see since the time of Nietzsche is that God in its medieval form is dead and cannot be brought back by fiat (or I hope not; it would be another theocracy). And, there is too much real knowledge - science and technology. Particularly since wokism is really a descendant set of memes and instincts of Christianity = WEIRD people at its root - all humans are equal, the last will be the first - and Christianity, and particularly Catholicism, in conjunction with proto-Marxism and post-Marxism, are the roots of all the zeal of guilt and self-loathing and "our mortal sin" of existence. Oh, spare me. Isn't that why we have a Marxist pope now, who spent time in mostly Marxist Catholicism in South America?
I will leave it at Lorenzo's saying: "Life is how purpose gets into the universe."
"That is the instinct for people to believe strongly in something irrational that would distinguish them from another tribe and allow them to defend themselves from their "evil" and go on a crusade (or whatever) to slaughter them. And of course it has a deep emotional root in us humans, and how would one expect it to present itself in our qualia?"
{...} "And I am not being derogatory toward religiosity - it is what it is; this is our evolutionary adaptation, for better or worse."
So it seems the irrational and emotional aspects of our nature provide the "cement" or "glue" that holds (or grabs) our logical and rational capabilities and (perhaps) points them towards whatever we consider a valid and valuable purpose. I just wonder if we cast our minds to 30K to 300K years or more into the future, will we find that we are evolving to enhance one aspect over the other to further enhance our prospects for survival? I would like to think the logical side is gaining ground. But that is probably just an emotional response on my part. :-)
ssri, I sincerely hope so too. I really enjoy Lorenzo's points about biological life being anti-entropic. However, with higher prosperity, human evolution tends to go dysgenic - the buildup of disease frequency and low fertility of high-intelligence individuals (as happened in Rome...) and "spiteful mutants" as a result. The only way out of it would be somehow gradually increasing wisdom and intelligence and health. Perhaps IVF selection - and some other approaches we don't have yet - will gradually lead to it all. Perhaps a society with an average IQ of the current 140 and slightly more positive character traits on average would bootstrap a positive, stable humanity? Just to make sure, I never imply the autistic guys' transhumanist nonsense. But you are right, the current trend leads to another kind of dark ages, so your 30K years - after a few dark ages - or 300K years - after a couple of glacial periods - is more likely. I share your emotion that hopefully all the "red in tooth and claw" in between will be worth it somehow.
If there is a writer who succinctly addresses the current situation as well as Lorenzo, send me a link.