Quanta have a couple of things bouncing out on the web now that I felt would be well worth your time and thought to consider. The first one is, as it subheads:
"Life was long thought to obey its own set of rules. But as simple systems show signs of lifelike behavior,
scientists are arguing about whether this apparent complexity is all a consequence of thermodynamics."
It goes in some length into a new view that thermodynamic probabilities can explain life without resorting to the biological norm of "evolution." I don't pretend to understand it all quite yet, but it does resonate some definite feelings.
The other item is a YouTube video, that the already linked article mentioned above, also linked to. I include it because the primary thrust of what I'd like to propose here contends more, I think, to entropy in general, though I suspect strongly that the issues in the first link are related as well.
Being something of a contrarian by nature anyway, I have a tendency to not let sit well notions that bother my sense of faith in things, also in general. And you would need look no further than the quite well established rule that all lines of variation will eventually fade to nothing. The absolute nothing of "no further differentials to transfer into equilibrium."
Essentially, one supposes, is the fact that all we get is what the singularity we started with imparted when it began extending the extent of both what, and when. That this singular thing is also supposed to be thought of as an, ultimately unknowable, quantity doesn't help very much of course, but still... Once you start expanding both what, and when, wouldn't the starting singularity still have to have been bounded in some way. Wouldn't it?
Well, that is one interesting question at least. It certainly does start me off to pondering things I know I get wrong far too often.
Let's start this way: Physicists have based a good portion of their very effective cosmological models on light that is sometimes billions of years old. What these models are then, in effect, are predictions of what was; what was, generally speaking, a quite long time ago (whether only hundreds of millions, or billions, isn't that critical for our discussion here). If that is so then one could justifiably state that these same models will not necessarily predict what will come in our future. Which would, of course, then to be automatically suggesting that there would be other factors still not recognized at all, much less not recognized to the proper degree.
Perhaps one could think of it along these lines:
What is not being taken into account here is the idea that "Meaning Space" and "Physical Space", in our particular vector of experience association, have not been interacting together for all that long (also begging the question of other intelligent life forms in this reality, which I'll leave to another discussion). Observation, after all, does have an interesting way of affecting what has been observed. In this, crossing as I must, over into philosophy, we have to consider that what we think, and what we do with what we think, works around into physical space in ways, beyond the usual suspects, we can only begin to speculate on now. And why wouldn't that be possible in an Entirety that is, in my view, an unbounded, singular expression, of infinite potential. At least, it seems to me, if you also accept the possibility of an infinite multiverse.
So then ask yourself this:
Would it be reasonable to suggest that the quantum foam that is thought to possibly inhabit pure vacuum might be the rumbling of interactions along other vectors of experience association.? Rumblings sensed at so many scales of consideration, energy, and time wise, beyond the nominal that we can no longer objectify them properly any longer?
Oh, I'll grant you, they can certainly plot probabilities for certain things, for certain, extremely brief, amounts of time, to pop up and out, but one wonders if that, too, may come to change once we've spent... Oh, I don't know... Perhaps say, for nice round numbers, the next several thousand years or so in keeping track of. At least then, if it didn't change, you could really start to feel a lot better about your sample size over time.
"Nothing comes of nothing," or so Parmenides thought. And if things can actually fall to nothing, was the starting something both that, and nothing at the same time (in a sense playing ending and beginning as one continuous, and timeless outside of our reality, loop)? Or is it a good deal more likely that things don't necessarily have to become completely undifferentiated. That, given the right thoughts, and actions, the accumulation of always differentiating structure is indeed possible, even if not especially likely. Structure can occur so much, in fact, that new, singular lines of experience association are made possible, thus keeping the fortuitous circle ongoing indeffinitely.
For me, this is just another way of keeping the idea of "thoughtful, loving structure" in mind both in my philosophy, and my politics.
How Life (and Death) Spring From Disorder
Life was long thought to obey its own set of rules. But as simple systems show signs of lifelike behavior, scientists are arguing about whether this apparent complexity is all a consequence of thermodynamics.
January 26, 2017
No comments:
Post a Comment