Re: The difference between organism and ecosystem...

["glen e. p. ropella" <***>]

Excellent post, Dan!  Without intending to trivialize what you said, it 
seems like you're simply arguing the traditional positive/negative 
feedback balance that has been the mainstay of cybernetics and the "edge 
of chaos" guys.  I worry that boiling it down to a binary system (like 
auto- and hetero-trophism) is going too far; but, there's plenty of 
evidence that coercing qualia into false dichotomies is cognitively 
useful.  You gotta start somewhere!

I have just one clarifying comment/question:

Dan Fiscus wrote:
> This thread gets more fun and wild when we consider
> that humans could decide to try to "prove" but more
> like assert or actualize that syntropy is greater than
> entropy if we set as our goal to establish life beyond
> our solar system. If we succeed, it would seem to
> demonstrate that the organizational capacity of the
> universe (physical and life/non-physical) is greater
> than the 2nd law tendency. And by extension over
> turn the doctrine of the 1st and 2nd laws as being
> supreme over things that are non-conserved and
> non-entropic, like life, love, the mind, ideas,
> information, creativity...etc...

The 2nd law only relates to isolated systems.  There's no law against a 
process increasing order in a given locale (presumably at the expense of 
order in the whole in which that locale sits) if the process is 
connected to other systems (with order to spare).  So, establishing life 
elsewhere in the solar system would only establish that we are capable 
of creating order in a given local (or, more appropriately, moving order 
from one locale to another).  And, since this order-motion would, 
presumably, give off unstructured and un-harnessable energy, the total 
order in the whole system should decrease.

Or have I misunderstood you?


--
glen e. p. ropella              =><=                Hail Eris!
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