> The default state of the world is wasted motion. This means that there is a constant fight against entropy... That's an interesting way of phrasing things,

> The default state of the world is wasted motion. This means that there is a constant fight against entropy... That's an interesting way of phrasing things, and in this context, it reveals a sort of innate natural paradox that I find really fascinating. The author here uses "motion" both to describe natural, universal entropy ("wasted motion"), and the more productive or meaningful sort motion that is the result of deliberate, intentional human action. The thing which I find so interesting here, is that the "useful motion" which goes into building the clever hacks that the author talks about - that motion can only be judged as effective by the evaluating the degree to which it reduces the wasteful motion/ natural entropy that was present previously. Ie, meaningful and "useful" motion can only exist in opposition to the more common natural, wasted motion. It reminds me of one the logions from an early gnostic text[1], that I had always found a bit confusing due to it's apparent insistence that "motion and rest" is key to what makes human beings special. I had mentally wrote off that saying, thinking it was either a relic of old school dualistic / karmic morality or that it was a simple "obey the sabbath" type of thing - but I'm now seeing the connection between human intellect and this sort of paradoxical type of "motion-which-reduces-motion" the author describes - and in that context "rest" could mean the the time spent introspecting, evaluating, and pivoting based on results. To give another example that I picked up from reading "The Beginning of Infinity" by David Deutsch, our human intellect is surprisingly unique and powerful exactly because it allows us to force the universe into states that would not otherwise arise on their own, even to the extent that we can build states which are otherwise impossible to arise in environments controlled by unchecked natural entropy. One example he gave to support this is the fact that absolute coldest place that we know of in the universe, is not in some far off galaxy - it's in a university lab that was designed and built specifically to maintain incredibly low temperatures for quantum computing research purposes. -- [1] Gospel of Thomas, 50: http://gnosis.org/naghamm/gosthom.html http://gnosis.org/naghamm/gosthom.html --