8 ms·

Check out the work of Ilya Prigogine - he won a Nobel prize in the 70's for his work on self-organizing complexity. There is a selection force in the universe f

by jmcqk6 3y ago

Check out the work of Ilya Prigogine - he won a Nobel prize in the 70's for his work on self-organizing complexity. There is a selection force in the universe for increasing complexity, being driven by the dissipation of energy. When you have systems in non-equilibrium, there is a strong pressure to explore the possibility space to find ever more efficient ways to dissipate energy. A bacteria the size of a grain of sand dissipates much, much more energy than the grain of sand, and so there is a very strong "preference" for bacteria in this regard.

mrkstu 3y ago
Is there already a theory for life->greater complexity similar to that of entropy in physics? It seems just as inexorable.
- bmitc 3y ago
  The theory is that they are one in the same, or better to say that entropy is the process that drives life. In that, life grows in complexity in order to dissipate heat (i.e., increase entropy) more efficiently. Just look at Earth. Life is incredibly complex but is ultimately driving everything towards dust.
  - knome 3y ago
    >life grows in complexity in order to dissipate heat This seems silly on the level of the anthropic principle. It's like claiming a calculator exists to use up electricity. We're eddies in the flow of energy from high to low entropy because it's free energy. We create more entropy in capturing energy than we capture because it's impossible not to. There's no purpose for life there. It's just where life lives.
    - keithwhor 3y ago
      > It's like claiming a calculator exists to use up electricity. sighs in bitcoin
    - uoaei 3y ago
      There is a minor pedantic point to make that akshually heat dissipation carves channels of energy flow that look to us like life rather than the causality going in the other direction.
  - lioeters 3y ago
    > entropy is the process that drives life Depending on how you look at it, life is driven by the opposite of entropy. Schrödinger in his book, What is Life?, calls it "negative entropy" or even "free energy". > In the 1944 book What is Life?, Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who in 1933 had won the Nobel Prize in Physics, theorized that life – contrary to the general tendency dictated by the second law of thermodynamics, which states that the entropy of an isolated system tends to increase – decreases or keeps constant its entropy by feeding on negative entropy. > The problem of organization in living systems increasing despite the second law is known as the Schrödinger paradox. This, Schrödinger argues, is what differentiates life from other forms of the organization of matter. > Schrödinger asked the question: "How does the living organism avoid decay?" The obvious answer is: "By eating, drinking, breathing and (in the case of plants) assimilating." While energy from nutrients is necessary to sustain an organism's order, Schrödinger also presciently postulated the existence of other molecules equally necessary for creating the order observed in living organisms: > "An organism's astonishing gift of concentrating a stream of order on itself and thus escaping the decay into atomic chaos – of drinking orderliness from a suitable environment – seems to be connected with the presence of the aperiodic solids..." We now know that this "aperiodic" crystal is DNA, and that its irregular arrangement is a form of information. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_and_life#Negative_entropy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_and_life#Negative_entr...
    - bmitc 3y ago
      I don't think you understand my point or what Schrodinger wrote. The Wikipedia synopsis of Schrodinger is unlikely to be accurate. https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-new-thermodynamics-theory-of-the-origin-of-life-20140122/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-new-thermodynamics-theory-o... https://www.bbvaopenmind.com/en/science/leading-figures/ilya-prigogine-brought-order-to-chaos/ https://www.bbvaopenmind.com/en/science/leading-figures/ilya...
      - lioeters 3y ago
        Thank you, I'm familiar with the work of Ilya Prigogine, and the first linked article is one of my favorites that I've read several times. The relationship between life and entropy is a fascinating topic for sure.
- pizza 3y ago
  You might really like the short book What is Life? by Schrödinger, it delves into exactly that.
forinti 3y ago
The Sun outputs 3.9 x 10^26W, but it weighs ~10^30kg, so that would mean 10^-4W/kg. Human beings are closer to 1W/kg at rest.
- adrianN 3y ago
  Now do a lump of plutonium.
  - conesus 3y ago
    How did that lump of plutonium become a lump? That part wasn’t natural.
    - forinti 3y ago
      Life is a great entropy accelerator.
      - mensetmanusman 3y ago
        compared to a black hole though?
        forinti 3y ago
        It might be too soon to tell. We might start creating them ourselves.
    - mapreduce 3y ago
      "How did that lump of plutonium become a lump? That part wasn’t natural." Allow me to become a little philosophical but since human beings which are product of nature made plutonium, isn't the making of plutonium natural too? I mean everything that is happening in this universe is natural! I know the general usage of the words "artificial" for human-made and "natural" for everything else. But when we are talking at the grand scale of life and universe I think a human-made plutonium is as natural as bee-made honey.
WaxProlix 3y ago
So we're all agents of Entropy, spinning our circles until we die all in the service of heat death? I don't like it!
- mordechai9000 3y ago
  As someone said about thermodynamics: You can't win, you can't break even, and you must play the game. (Source unknown)
- namaria 3y ago
  I don't understand this view at all. We are what we are. Entropy is a concept in our mind and heat death is a very particular phenomenon that depends on the systems experiencing it being very specifically defined in ways that the Universe cannot be. We are. Descartes had the right idea. The experience of consciousness is irreducible. To say "we are atoms thinking" and variations thereof is utterly meaningless. All words and concepts used for such word play is dependent on the experience of human consciousness. They don't exist independently. Consciousness is the only thing we can posit that has independent existence. Everything else is just a concept created by a conscious being. It's like the tree falling in the forest with no one to hear it. A universe without consciousness experiencing it really exists? Existence is a property of consciousness. We can't conceive of things that are not experienced, by definition. Even if we imagine a dead universe with just energy and no consciousness, that is an image that exists inside of a conscious mind.
  - dvt 3y ago
    > Existence is a property of consciousness. Kant would vehemently disagree. Not that I'm a Kantian, but he makes some pretty good points. So I think there's a lot of work here that needs to be done to make your argument stronger.
    - namaria 3y ago
      I'm not into winning debates. I just find interesting that conscious beings think they can imagine the absence of consciousness. For us consciousness is the fundamental reality. Furthermore I find the verbosity of German philosophy nearly unbearable, to be honest.
calf 3y ago
That is mind blowing! It reminds me of Conway and Wolfram's automata theories although perhaps those models did not emphasize the energy aspect of it.
manmal 3y ago
Very interesting. Do you have an intuition for why there is selection pressure towards energy dissipation?
- jmcqk6 3y ago
  My current intuition goes something like this: Energy MUST flow. No matter how energy is captured and stored, there is a pressure for it to continue moving. The movement of energy means that matter is always moving, and new configurations are always being "discovered." Some configurations allow for energy to flow more easily, and when one of those configurations is "discovered" the movement of energy keeps that configuration in place. I think it's literally a strange attractor from chaos theory. Areas of stable energy flow create correlations across space time that allow for more complex correlations to emerge.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - rileyphone 3y ago
    Here’s an interesting network-focused view as to why that might be: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2012.2863 https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2012.286...
  - sydbarrett74 3y ago
    Sorry if this question is answered elsewhere in this post's replies, but would you say that matter can be viewed as 'captured' energy, or energy at rest?
    - nyssos 3y ago
      > matter can be viewed as 'captured' energy, or energy at rest? No, matter isn't 'captured' energy any more than it's 'captured' mass or momentum. Energy is a quantity, not a substance.
      - 3y ago
hughesjj 3y ago
I love it. Was susskind inspired by this at all with his complexity=action (duality) [1] hypothesis? Theres a bunch of lectures of him on YouTube going off about how complexity increases asymptotically greater than entropy in a black hole, but I need to refresh myself on the lecture. Disclosure: I'm an idiot, and may be spewing nonsense [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CA-duality https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CA-duality
jamesblonde 3y ago
You forgot to mention that Prigogine's model includes a system boundary. Within the system, the 2nd law of thermodynamics no longer holds - the system does not tend towards entropy, as the system ingests energy and exports entropy.
- PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
  Put in Prigogine's terms: the system is not at, and does not reach, equilibrium (the state that most other chemical science tends to assume).
bloopernova 3y ago
I absolutely adore the simplicity behind this: Energy must balance, so it flows from high concentrations to lower concentrations. Things that help that flow are selected for. From that springs everything we are. Utterly amazing to me that from a gradient plus some random chemicals plus time equals humans, sex, violence, loss, birth, love, games, music, and so much more. All just to help the earth cool down a little bit faster.
- tsunamifury 3y ago
  Absolutely none of this follows
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- friend_and_foe 3y ago
  It doesn't help the earth cool down faster, it actually traps energy for longer in metabolic processes. But it does red shift it. The film of muck on the surface that we call life lowers the planet's albedo and the radiation that shines out of it is of a longer wavelength than if it were just reflected.
- kaashif 3y ago
  > Things that help that flow are selected for. I don't get this part, why does this follow? Why would life that transfers heat faster get selected for? This seems backwards to me: in reality it seems like life that is more capable or more adapted reproduces more, and that results in more heat moving around most of the time. But progress can go backwards, if there were a nuclear war this would reduce heat transfer.
ajuc 3y ago
So where's the bacteria outcompeting moon dust? Theories which make life inevitable are inherently shaky because we have 1 sample.
- nerdbert 3y ago
  You can't have theories without life to conceive of them, so in fact life is inevitable under any theory.
  - ajuc 3y ago
    That's just antrophic principle, no need for any selection pressure or any particular theory at all. That's why all of them are shaky.
- bmitc 3y ago
  Where are the conditions for life on the Moon? You can't have something if the conditions to form it are missing. Your question is equivalent to asking why stars don't form outside dust clouds.
  - ajuc 3y ago
    There are ways for the matter on the moon to dissipate energy faster than moon dust. We could build a moon base for example. It doesn't do it. In fact as far as we know - most of the space in the universe is doing the dissipation in a very inefficient way. Which means the theory that it will do it simply because of the "selection pressure" is empirically wrong. Let's say a huge asteroid sterilized Earth 100 years ago. What could the life do to outcompete that? Was it the result of this "selection pressure" that it didn't or was it simply result of starting conditions and gravity? This theory seems to provide almost no predictive value it just takes a thing that happened once and makes a story about how it had to happen.
    - bmitc 3y ago
      > Which means the theory that it will do it simply because of the "selection pressure" is empirically wrong. Again, this is not true. We have empirical evidence that life on Earth began as soon as it could. And the universe doesn't spontaneously do things as you're wishing it to do to support your argument. > Let's say a huge asteroid sterilized Earth 100 years ago. What could the life do to outcompete that? That doesn't negate anything. Entropy increases over time. Given the various conditions available in the universe, its processes follow that directive relevant to their conditions.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

by jmcqk6 3y ago

mrkstu 3y ago

Is there already a theory for life->greater complexity similar to that of entropy in physics? It seems just as inexorable.

bmitc 3y ago
The theory is that they are one in the same, or better to say that entropy is the process that drives life. In that, life grows in complexity in order to dissipate heat (i.e., increase entropy) more efficiently. Just look at Earth. Life is incredibly complex but is ultimately driving everything towards dust.
- knome 3y ago
  >life grows in complexity in order to dissipate heat This seems silly on the level of the anthropic principle. It's like claiming a calculator exists to use up electricity. We're eddies in the flow of energy from high to low entropy because it's free energy. We create more entropy in capturing energy than we capture because it's impossible not to. There's no purpose for life there. It's just where life lives.
  - keithwhor 3y ago
    > It's like claiming a calculator exists to use up electricity. sighs in bitcoin
  - uoaei 3y ago
    There is a minor pedantic point to make that akshually heat dissipation carves channels of energy flow that look to us like life rather than the causality going in the other direction.
- lioeters 3y ago
  > entropy is the process that drives life Depending on how you look at it, life is driven by the opposite of entropy. Schrödinger in his book, What is Life?, calls it "negative entropy" or even "free energy". > In the 1944 book What is Life?, Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who in 1933 had won the Nobel Prize in Physics, theorized that life – contrary to the general tendency dictated by the second law of thermodynamics, which states that the entropy of an isolated system tends to increase – decreases or keeps constant its entropy by feeding on negative entropy. > The problem of organization in living systems increasing despite the second law is known as the Schrödinger paradox. This, Schrödinger argues, is what differentiates life from other forms of the organization of matter. > Schrödinger asked the question: "How does the living organism avoid decay?" The obvious answer is: "By eating, drinking, breathing and (in the case of plants) assimilating." While energy from nutrients is necessary to sustain an organism's order, Schrödinger also presciently postulated the existence of other molecules equally necessary for creating the order observed in living organisms: > "An organism's astonishing gift of concentrating a stream of order on itself and thus escaping the decay into atomic chaos – of drinking orderliness from a suitable environment – seems to be connected with the presence of the aperiodic solids..." We now know that this "aperiodic" crystal is DNA, and that its irregular arrangement is a form of information. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_and_life#Negative_entropy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_and_life#Negative_entr...
  - bmitc 3y ago
    I don't think you understand my point or what Schrodinger wrote. The Wikipedia synopsis of Schrodinger is unlikely to be accurate. https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-new-thermodynamics-theory-of-the-origin-of-life-20140122/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-new-thermodynamics-theory-o... https://www.bbvaopenmind.com/en/science/leading-figures/ilya-prigogine-brought-order-to-chaos/ https://www.bbvaopenmind.com/en/science/leading-figures/ilya...
    - lioeters 3y ago
      Thank you, I'm familiar with the work of Ilya Prigogine, and the first linked article is one of my favorites that I've read several times. The relationship between life and entropy is a fascinating topic for sure.
pizza 3y ago
You might really like the short book What is Life? by Schrödinger, it delves into exactly that.

forinti 3y ago

The Sun outputs 3.9 x 10^26W, but it weighs ~10^30kg, so that would mean 10^-4W/kg. Human beings are closer to 1W/kg at rest.

adrianN 3y ago
Now do a lump of plutonium.
- conesus 3y ago
  How did that lump of plutonium become a lump? That part wasn’t natural.
  - forinti 3y ago
    Life is a great entropy accelerator.
    - mensetmanusman 3y ago
      compared to a black hole though?
      - forinti 3y ago
        It might be too soon to tell. We might start creating them ourselves.
  - mapreduce 3y ago
    "How did that lump of plutonium become a lump? That part wasn’t natural." Allow me to become a little philosophical but since human beings which are product of nature made plutonium, isn't the making of plutonium natural too? I mean everything that is happening in this universe is natural! I know the general usage of the words "artificial" for human-made and "natural" for everything else. But when we are talking at the grand scale of life and universe I think a human-made plutonium is as natural as bee-made honey.

WaxProlix 3y ago

So we're all agents of Entropy, spinning our circles until we die all in the service of heat death? I don't like it!

mordechai9000 3y ago
As someone said about thermodynamics: You can't win, you can't break even, and you must play the game. (Source unknown)
namaria 3y ago
I don't understand this view at all. We are what we are. Entropy is a concept in our mind and heat death is a very particular phenomenon that depends on the systems experiencing it being very specifically defined in ways that the Universe cannot be. We are. Descartes had the right idea. The experience of consciousness is irreducible. To say "we are atoms thinking" and variations thereof is utterly meaningless. All words and concepts used for such word play is dependent on the experience of human consciousness. They don't exist independently. Consciousness is the only thing we can posit that has independent existence. Everything else is just a concept created by a conscious being. It's like the tree falling in the forest with no one to hear it. A universe without consciousness experiencing it really exists? Existence is a property of consciousness. We can't conceive of things that are not experienced, by definition. Even if we imagine a dead universe with just energy and no consciousness, that is an image that exists inside of a conscious mind.
- dvt 3y ago
  > Existence is a property of consciousness. Kant would vehemently disagree. Not that I'm a Kantian, but he makes some pretty good points. So I think there's a lot of work here that needs to be done to make your argument stronger.
  - namaria 3y ago
    I'm not into winning debates. I just find interesting that conscious beings think they can imagine the absence of consciousness. For us consciousness is the fundamental reality. Furthermore I find the verbosity of German philosophy nearly unbearable, to be honest.

calf 3y ago

That is mind blowing! It reminds me of Conway and Wolfram's automata theories although perhaps those models did not emphasize the energy aspect of it.

manmal 3y ago

Very interesting. Do you have an intuition for why there is selection pressure towards energy dissipation?

jmcqk6 3y ago
My current intuition goes something like this: Energy MUST flow. No matter how energy is captured and stored, there is a pressure for it to continue moving. The movement of energy means that matter is always moving, and new configurations are always being "discovered." Some configurations allow for energy to flow more easily, and when one of those configurations is "discovered" the movement of energy keeps that configuration in place. I think it's literally a strange attractor from chaos theory. Areas of stable energy flow create correlations across space time that allow for more complex correlations to emerge.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- rileyphone 3y ago
  Here’s an interesting network-focused view as to why that might be: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2012.2863 https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2012.286...
- sydbarrett74 3y ago
  Sorry if this question is answered elsewhere in this post's replies, but would you say that matter can be viewed as 'captured' energy, or energy at rest?
  - nyssos 3y ago
    > matter can be viewed as 'captured' energy, or energy at rest? No, matter isn't 'captured' energy any more than it's 'captured' mass or momentum. Energy is a quantity, not a substance.
    - 3y ago

hughesjj 3y ago

I love it. Was susskind inspired by this at all with his complexity=action (duality) [1] hypothesis? Theres a bunch of lectures of him on YouTube going off about how complexity increases asymptotically greater than entropy in a black hole, but I need to refresh myself on the lecture. Disclosure: I'm an idiot, and may be spewing nonsense [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CA-duality https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CA-duality

jamesblonde 3y ago

You forgot to mention that Prigogine's model includes a system boundary. Within the system, the 2nd law of thermodynamics no longer holds - the system does not tend towards entropy, as the system ingests energy and exports entropy.

PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
Put in Prigogine's terms: the system is not at, and does not reach, equilibrium (the state that most other chemical science tends to assume).

bloopernova 3y ago

I absolutely adore the simplicity behind this: Energy must balance, so it flows from high concentrations to lower concentrations. Things that help that flow are selected for. From that springs everything we are. Utterly amazing to me that from a gradient plus some random chemicals plus time equals humans, sex, violence, loss, birth, love, games, music, and so much more. All just to help the earth cool down a little bit faster.

tsunamifury 3y ago
Absolutely none of this follows
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
friend_and_foe 3y ago
It doesn't help the earth cool down faster, it actually traps energy for longer in metabolic processes. But it does red shift it. The film of muck on the surface that we call life lowers the planet's albedo and the radiation that shines out of it is of a longer wavelength than if it were just reflected.
kaashif 3y ago
> Things that help that flow are selected for. I don't get this part, why does this follow? Why would life that transfers heat faster get selected for? This seems backwards to me: in reality it seems like life that is more capable or more adapted reproduces more, and that results in more heat moving around most of the time. But progress can go backwards, if there were a nuclear war this would reduce heat transfer.

ajuc 3y ago

So where's the bacteria outcompeting moon dust? Theories which make life inevitable are inherently shaky because we have 1 sample.

nerdbert 3y ago
You can't have theories without life to conceive of them, so in fact life is inevitable under any theory.
- ajuc 3y ago
  That's just antrophic principle, no need for any selection pressure or any particular theory at all. That's why all of them are shaky.
bmitc 3y ago
Where are the conditions for life on the Moon? You can't have something if the conditions to form it are missing. Your question is equivalent to asking why stars don't form outside dust clouds.
- ajuc 3y ago
  There are ways for the matter on the moon to dissipate energy faster than moon dust. We could build a moon base for example. It doesn't do it. In fact as far as we know - most of the space in the universe is doing the dissipation in a very inefficient way. Which means the theory that it will do it simply because of the "selection pressure" is empirically wrong. Let's say a huge asteroid sterilized Earth 100 years ago. What could the life do to outcompete that? Was it the result of this "selection pressure" that it didn't or was it simply result of starting conditions and gravity? This theory seems to provide almost no predictive value it just takes a thing that happened once and makes a story about how it had to happen.
  - bmitc 3y ago
    > Which means the theory that it will do it simply because of the "selection pressure" is empirically wrong. Again, this is not true. We have empirical evidence that life on Earth began as soon as it could. And the universe doesn't spontaneously do things as you're wishing it to do to support your argument. > Let's say a huge asteroid sterilized Earth 100 years ago. What could the life do to outcompete that? That doesn't negate anything. Entropy increases over time. Given the various conditions available in the universe, its processes follow that directive relevant to their conditions.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]