I remember reading somewhere that maybe the purpose of life is to increase entropy in the universe. If that is true and we haven't found any sound evidence of life elsewhere, I don't know.
I remember reading somewhere that maybe the purpose of life is to increase entropy in the universe. If that is true and we haven't found any sound evidence of life elsewhere, I don't know.
Where did you read this? "Purpose" is a very loaded word. If life has any purpose at all, it's to reproduce and propagate one's genes. Additional entropy just sounds like an inevitable side-effect of that.
"to reproduce and populate its genes" feels like a better fit for the purpose of an organism.
If you subscribe to the big bang theory (and the idea that the purpose of a system is what it does), then the universe's purpose is to walk a path from low entropy to high entropy. Of what use is life, in such an endeavor? Well, life tends to seek out bits of stuck energy (food/fuel) and release it (metabolism/economy)--moving the universe further along on its path.
This gives a sort of answer to the question: "why bother have live at all?" And so I think the entropy purpose makes sense--moreso than just having it just be a side effect. Nobody will ever be absolutely right or wrong about such things (purposes), but they're handy to have around sometimes.
Can life evolve to slow down the process of increasing entropy? For ex: Sun is throwing energy in space. What if life tries to store it and use it only when it needs? Has the sunlight gone into space (without being captured by fossilized life), it would have thinly spread out in universe(high entropy, low energy density). But plants and humans (solar cells) capturing it to create fossil fules or create some infrastructure... Is it not life going against this theory? Or is it just intermidiate step of life which eventually (life will) blast all energy in short period of time at the end like an expontial system does?
Certainly. If you look at the various steps in cellular respiration (happens in animals, starts with glucose and ends up with ATP) you'll see that it takes many of them to gradually release that energy such that it can be made use of at a rate that jives with the cell's needs. There's so much complexity that has gone into controlling this rate. It would've been much simpler to just burn it all at once and explode.
What I find compelling is how it works at low and high levels. Low level because we dissipate energy just by being a living creature. And the high level because as you said, we as a civilization can't seem to escape it, and want to use pockets of low entropy like mineral veins and fuels. Until all is spent i guess. You don't mention how unsympathetic that purpose is, though. At that point any purpose you make for yourself is better than that one even if it's true.
> At that point any purpose you make for yourself is better than that one even if it's true.
Absolutely, let's not let thermodynamics be the final word on the topic.
But suppose we did... To anybody who would cite this as a reason to drill more oil, I'd say that part of the equation is that we must also survive. In 10k years there will still be plenty of useful sunlight falling on the planet. Ideally we'll be around then, harnessing it to throw really great parties or whatever. If we aren't choosy about our fuel sources in the near term we might not be around to continue at this purpose in the long term.
I wouldn't be so sure. You'd still need to mine for the batteries and the rest of the infrastructure.... And then plastics also dissipate into micro and nanoplastics possibly robbing life of vitality. But again, this involves predicting things that never happened yet, so I might be very wrong for reasons I don't consider.
Oh I'm not trying to make any claims about any type of energy infrastructure in particular.
I'm just saying that even if the game is merely to contribute as much as possible to this Big Bang that we're living in, we're still gonna lose if we focus on short term gains a the expense of our survival.
Stafford Beers, "The Purpose of a System is What it Does (POSIWID)", very hot right now..
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/come-on-obviously-the-purpo...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...
When Beers says:
> According to the cybernetician the purpose of a system is what it does...
The "according to the cybernetician" part makes it pretty clear that we're now entering some kind of abstract space that cares not for the stated intentions of humans. It seems that what's "very hot right now" is to ignore the first part.
I think it's an especially reasonable position to take when the system in question has no designer to disagree with anyhow.
> we're now entering some kind of abstract space that cares not for the stated intentions of humans
But that's the thing about systems: they may involve humans but they don't necessarily reflect the intentions of the individual humans involved. Even when a system is created with a stated intent (i.e. for a stated purpose) that doesn't mean it will actually behave in a way that aligns with this intent. Logically you then shouldn't take the human intent into consideration when analyzing a system's actual effects and outcomes (except to determine whether it aligns with those but that's secondary).
IOW the purpose of a system (i.e. "what it exists for") can be different from the purpose for which it was created (i.e. "what it is meant to do"). I guess "purpose" in this case is an overloaded term because the former more uses a meaning that more closely aligns with "function" (like the function of a predator in an ecosystem may be controlling prey population but that doesn't suggest intent nor design) and the latter uses a meaning that more closely aligns with "intent" (like during wildfires controlled burns are performed with the intent of stopping the spread of the wildfire).
But I'd say it's a stretch to apply this to statements like "the purpose of organisms is to increase entropy" because that strongly implies intent rather than function (because the latter could also be simply expressed as "organisms create entropy").
POSIWID is usually the end result of asking some basic questions about "A System":
For organisms, sometimes just asking it directly can give more useful answers (or surprises,YMMV)Not necessarily. Cybernetics was specifically the study of systems, so that part can also be taken as an appeal to the experts in the matter.
Generally the point of this observation is specifically about human systems, either designed or evolved. The observation stems from the fact that it's (a) impossible to ascertain what the true intention of a human that designed a system was (they may be publicly lying about it, or even privately, it even to themselves), and (b) any complex enough system has been influenced and possibly "warped" by many more than one human, so the original unique intention, whatever it was, isn't the sole guiding principle behind it.
So, if analyzing a system, rather than trying to dig into its creators' history or anything like that, it's best to just look at what the system is doing and consider that its true current purpose.
Stop it. My eyes can only roll so much.
Agreed about purpose being a loaded term.
It's my, somewhat lazy, philosophical opinion, that there isn't any purpose and there doesn't need to be one.
I don't see why the universe would need a purpose for anything. Things are what they. Things changing state. Entropy.
I see reproduction as more of built in motivation to our system than a purpose as such. But that's semantics, and my purpose in life is not to argue about words! ;-)
Could be. Could also be that reproduction and propagation is the inevitable side effect of that, no? We cant dissipate energy when we're dead.
Rather a way to accomplish that. Life reproducing in order to accelerate the generation of entropy, in other words.
Pretty sure this is what Schrodingers opinion is in his book “what is life?” But I haven’t read it. Maybe OP got it from that
Reproduction is not really a purpose. What makes copies of itself, happens to persist.
It tracks, though "attaining a higher state of entropy" is just what Universes generally do it seems, given our n of 1 Universes we've started to evaluate.
Though, I'm not sure if life is the best at it, when compared to say a black hole. Some smart apes burning off fossil fuels seems pretty insignificant in comparison -- or even seeing what our own Sun does in a few seconds.
File that under, "The Earth will be fine in the long run, it's humans that are f'd" George Carlin pov. Maybe when we start building Death Stars (plural)
I read somewhere that life is more efficient at dissipating energy and faster at increasing entropy than non-living physical/chemical phenomena. Citation needed.
https://www.amazon.nl/Every-Life-Fire-Thermodynamics-Explain...
Right, it's less about the purpose of life (which implies a directive force) and more that a characteristic of life is it's an emergent complexity that finds more efficient ways of increasing entropy.
It gets a bit blurry when you start to substitute "life" for any "complex cosmological system" though...
I think it was from Sean Caroll's book The Big Picture.
The statement is a category error, but that criticism distracts from the very valuable insight he does provide regarding entropy, life and complexity.
He did a series on minutephysics explaining it quite well, worth a watch. He does explain why complexity increases as entropy increases (with some additional qualification).
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLoaVOjvkzQtyZF-2VpJrx...
POSIWID. Life on earth's primary "purpose" if observed from space would be to dissipate low-entropy solar radiation, using it to build temporary structures out of carbon.
It is puzzling why life isn't more common. Perhaps dissipative self-organizing structures are everywhere - stars, solar systems and galaxies themselves maintain their order by dissipating energy. They just don't look like "life" to us.
I have lost the book, but I think I read this in "What is Life? And Other Scientific Essays" by Erwin Schrödinger. If I recall, it was one of the "Other Scientific Essays."
We are only relatively recently have good enough tooling to even talk about discovering bio- and technosignatures in the atmosphere of exoplanets. I'm really hoping that we will find some undeniable evidence in my lifetime.
Surely you mean accelerate entropy.
I presume the end-state of entropy would be the same (excluding ways to escape the universe).
I mean purpose is assigning too much agency, but it's relatively easy to show cells are entropy pumps - they survive by producing a lot more entropy in their environment then is recovered from dying.