4 ms·

I really enjoyed "The demon in the machine" - anyone know of other good books exploring the topic?

tomxor 5y ago
Not a book but another article from quanta, and my favourite on the subject, not for it's technical depth but for it's perspective: https://www.wired.com/2017/02/life-death-spring-disorder/ https://www.wired.com/2017/02/life-death-spring-disorder/ I felt like this one brings in the modern understanding combining Maxwell, Shannon and Landauer into a tangible perspective of everyday reality... maxwell demon is not "solvable", it's an extreme example for the purpose of a thought experiment, however practical "versions" of it exist everywhere, once you combine the costs as per landauers contributions, swap an infinite tape for a large tape, you essentially have a cache - when you start to observe biological and complex chemical systems with this perspective it really does feel like life can be thought of as little emergent upstream eddies "anti-entropy" machines in a torrent of entropy, like a dead fish that naturally swims upstream, there is no defying physics here, entropy still increases universally, but these are natural local variations. It's hard to not believe "reducing entropy" is the fundamental "meaning of life" with this point of view, a meaning that is shared among all life: to not dissolve into oblivion, to collect little hacks of physics and chemistry to find better and better ways to evade it.
- K0balt 5y ago
  This is also my perspective, that living things are fundamentally machines which externalize entropy, and the processing of information is crucial to this task. The task of living is that of using information to harvest order out of entropy, much as maxwells daemon . Of course this increases overall entropy, only conserving order locally....so you could also think of life as a “fire” that burns order out of imperfectly disordered systems.
  - tomxor 5y ago
    I missed this > that living things are fundamentally machines which externalize entropy That's a clearer way to put, externalising or displacing, makes it more palatable for those getting stuck with the laws of thermodynamics.

Not a book but another article from quanta, and my favourite on the subject, not for it's technical depth but for it's perspective: https://www.wired.com/2017/02/life-death-spring-disorder/ https://www.wired.com/2017/02/life-death-spring-disorder/ I felt like this one brings in the modern understanding combining Maxwell, Shannon and Landauer into a tangible perspective of everyday reality... maxwell demon is not "solvable", it's an extreme example for the purpose of a thought experiment, however practical "versions" of it exist everywhere, once you combine the costs as per landauers contributions, swap an infinite tape for a large tape, you essentially have a cache - when you start to observe biological and complex chemical systems with this perspective it really does feel like life can be thought of as little emergent upstream eddies "anti-entropy" machines in a torrent of entropy, like a dead fish that naturally swims upstream, there is no defying physics here, entropy still increases universally, but these are natural local variations. It's hard to not believe "reducing entropy" is the fundamental "meaning of life" with this point of view, a meaning that is shared among all life: to not dissolve into oblivion, to collect little hacks of physics and chemistry to find better and better ways to evade it.

K0balt 5y ago
This is also my perspective, that living things are fundamentally machines which externalize entropy, and the processing of information is crucial to this task. The task of living is that of using information to harvest order out of entropy, much as maxwells daemon . Of course this increases overall entropy, only conserving order locally....so you could also think of life as a “fire” that burns order out of imperfectly disordered systems.
- tomxor 5y ago
  I missed this > that living things are fundamentally machines which externalize entropy That's a clearer way to put, externalising or displacing, makes it more palatable for those getting stuck with the laws of thermodynamics.