I’m probably using a deformed lay-person concept of entropy since I’m a know nothing who pretends, but the characterization of life as a thing that struggles against entropy has a good metaphorical ring to it to me because of the maintenance of information. Some of our genes are perfect replicas of genes that were around a very, very long time ago. Sure we create entropy to get energy, but what have we used all that energy on? Protecting the integrity of a few piece of information.
If you think of the natural world as an analogue computer (that is digital when observed in a strong magnetic field?!?), then by the time you’ve built digital out of the analogue and then rebuilt analogue out the digital you have wasted a massive amount of effort, and by doing so you might have priced yourself out of success. Just as it takes a staggeringly simple system to be Turing complete able to theoretically do anything, it takes a staggeringly simple system to be so complicated that it can’t be ever practically analyzed. So I concede to the devil you are advocating for.
But back to the reason I brought the example of simulating consciousness up in the first place, those are both examples of how staggering complexity arises out of simplicity, which I think goes back to my point that we don’t have a good reason to believe that different universes can’t make life or consciousness. It really might not take much at all, even if it turns out that a finite Conway’s Life wouldn’t be able to do it, so I don’t like people pretending the burden of proof is on those who think life/consciousness can arise easily from a few elementary particles and four forces. I think the burden of proof is on those who think the probability of a universe being able to support life can be determined.
This is a great framing of this issue that kind of perplexed me about old stories. Moses makes his staff into a snake. Then the pharaoh’s magicians go, “Hey, that’s easy, anyone can do that.” Then Moses’ snake eats the Pharoah’s snake. From the old testament, I get the idea that God isn’t even supposed to be the only god. It’s just that he can beat up all the other gods.
Oh hell no! By trade, I’m a computational physicist specializing in quantum computation. You’re giving me a better debate that I normally get at work. You might be a lay-person, but you’re no pretender, IMHO. FWIW, I mostly agree with your positions. I just don’t normally get a chance to bounce ideas back and forth between someone as sharp as you, so I’m taking the chance to give it my best parry.
I think you can at least take credit for pretending really well – I’d say to the point where it’s enough to conclude something is really there, but then that’s the room discussion we just had. But yeah, this is a popular notion of entropy almost at direct odds with the actual one.
In thermodynamics entropy really refers to the degrees of freedom a system has, like the different ways molecules could vibrate that thermal energy will end up distributed between. This is certainly disorder in some sense, but what we normally consider order doesn’t always mean its opposite.
In particular there is good reason that in information theory, entropy corresponds to a measure of the presence of information, not its absence. An encyclopedia is described a lot better as an arbitrary if particular sequence of symbols than it is an orderly arrangement of them. It’s because the sequence is disordered that it can be selected to encode things for us; there would be much less if the whole book was just the same few words regularly repeated.
Either way, then, I don’t think life is actually against entropy at all but a great manifestation of it. Energy from the sun dissipates into space, and like the peculiar meanderings formed by a river, the entropy from that folds its path into all sorts of complex structures. C’est la vie.
It’s not that much about entropy but about dissipating the energy from a metastable state to a more stable one. Life is just a way of the energy to get through the potential barriers.
Entropy can go up or down during the stages of the process, as long as the total energy goes down or at least flows through.
As far as the energy is concerned I agree, but it’s like you say, entropy can go either way in different steps. Sometimes a flow ends up cutting a relatively straight path for itself, and sometimes it builds more and more meanders on top of each other. Life is a remarkable example of the second type, entropic complexities made as energy fans out through more and more contorted metabolic and synthetic pathways.
I don’t mind being told how smart I am by someone objective. :smite: (I’m just gonna leave that typo there)
Now that I will take credit for.
Thanks for the explanation. I am definitely mistaking order for information. If you have 8 bits to store things but the 8th is a checksum then you can actually only store 7 bits of information. If half of those configurations would be meaningless in the system you are using (who uses unsigned ints?) then you only have 6 bits of information. In thermodynamics, if you are talking about degrees of freedom then there for a given volume and quantity of energy/mass there is a maximum entropy - the entropy that would exist if everything was totally unconstrained. So again have a value for the amount of “order” (not order) in the system - the difference between entropy and maximum entropy. But, thinking of it that way I can see how it is as you say - order is not information, order is more like staticness and eats up the space for information. On the other hand, without some amount of “order” information wouldn’t really be able to exist in the other parts. If an encyclopedia were actually just a disordered string of characters it wouldn’t be much good.
I guess the idea that life is the fight against entropy is more of the English word “entropy” meaning decline into disorder or decay.
Yeah well I haven’t addressed the broader argument, I just focused on one aspect of it that I feel I have a reasonable understanding of. The rest of the argument is really speculative, and I’d need to really dig into it to defend it.
This is where we differ then, I don’t assume that consciousness is likely to be an emergent property of any sufficiently organised and complex system, for the reasons I’ve put forward. I’m not arguing that consciousness is not a material thing, I’m arguing that it is a very specific thing we understand poorly, and without a better understanding of what it is we can’t just assume that things that act conscious will be so.
But we aren’t talking about whether things that act conscious are conscious. We are talking about whether a universe is likely to contain consciousness or not. In my ultimately flawed appeal to Conway’s Life, I wasn’t suggesting than any possible universe was actually Conway’s Life. If we have no idea what components are necessary to produce consciousness, then the burden of proof isn’t on proving that consciousness is likely anymore than it is on proving it is unlikely, the default position is, “How could we possibly know that?” until more evidence comes along. I’m not really trying to argue that it is likely, so much as I’m trying to argue that we have no good reason to say it is unlikely. We don’t know that Planck’s constant has to be finely tuned for life to appear, and even if we did, we don’t know the probability distribution for Planck’s constant in an arbitrary universe.
Ultimately in this discussion the question on the nature of consciousness is secondary to the question of whether the possibility of consciousness is likely, and I’m just not in a position to argue that with any conviction. It’s an idea I read about, at first glance I had the same reaction as you, but the article went on to suggest that in most other possible universes any structure we can imagine would be impossible, thus consciousness also.
I’d have to track down that article and do some reading to see how plausible the idea is but it sounded pretty cool when I read it, it certainly stuck with me!
ETA: Damn thread closed before I could reply! In response to your post below:
Yes I understand your position, it’s a strong one. Don’t worry about how you come across, in the main you come across as an academic used to arguing with great rigour, and these days I rarely get a chance to test my ideas against that kind of scrutiny, and I really enjoy the opportunity. It’s a rough ride though!
I’ve encountered the idea before, and I guess I find it frustrating because at first upon hearing it, it has this ring of truth to it - it certainly made sense to me when I first encountered it, and lots of other people I know how I can say objectively are very smart - but ultimately it’s kind of built out of nothing. We just don’t know too much: whether the constants can even vary; if they can if they are restricted in some way; if things were different what would they actually be like; how much complexity do we need for consciousness to be possible; how many universes are there to have a chance at doing this; and so on.
I’m sorry that I came across as aggressive, I think I could be perfectly congenial about it in person. Maybe I need more emojis.
Although that isn’t strictly wrong, it’s an incomplete meaning of its technical usage. There are also several kinds of entropy that, while related, are distinct phenomena.
But yeah, this is a popular notion of entropy almost at direct odds with the actual one.
