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Hi Folks,
I just got back from a nine day business trip and am working my way
through all the accumulated email. Looks like I missed some stimulating
discussion! Luckily, this is an email discussion list, where going back in time
is easy... I have some comments, interspersed, below:
Dan Fiscus wrote: the easiest way to (maybe) sneak
out from the laws/rules
below is to focus on "things" that are not conserved, that are created and destroyed, such as information, relations, life forms, energy quality (as opposed to quantity), etc. Prigogine deals some with the creation and destruction of *correlations* in his book The End of Certainty. I don't understand it yet, not even close. Same section deals with Poincare resonances. This is an important set of ideas. Dan could write an entire
monograph on the implications of this set of ideas. The truth inherent
in them would seem to prove that conservation of matter/energy is not a
universally applicable, general law of the universe but, instead, is a
conception based entirely on a very selective collection of empirical
phenomena-- which maybe are only "locally" observable . I think such a
law would only hold true as a general law, if the universe were a simple
system-- where a relation cannot change the nature of that which interacts via
the relation. But there is abundant evidence that our universe isn't like that.
As Dan pointed out, relations can be created and destroyed/dissolved-- and ARE,
all the time. They can be completely invisible to science, obviously, or they
can make certain kinds of systems incomprehensible via science. I think this
describes the situation as it stands right now.
DF: A catch for the evasive maneuver about non-conservative
entities
would be that even non-material "things" like relations must exist in material form, or *in between* material forms, and so at that point the laws would all seem to hold again for the material as necessary complement or context for relational/topological. How do you figure? How would we know about systems which have no
material form? The statement that all relations must exist between
material "things" or with "material form" depends entirely on certain
assumptions (which have been called into question by my father's work). It seems
to me that there may be infinite non-material systems which don't require any
contribution from particulate matter. In fact, perhaps what we refer to as
particulate matter is actually the net effect resulting from relations
between non-material "things".
DF: Another comment is that while many in ecology and
theoretical
biology and related fields talk about life always working to dissipate gradients (part of being open to high quality energy input, which allows organizing work to be done locally at the expense of entropy increase globally/regionally), it seems to me that any process of dissipating a gradient or degrading energy quality must be accompanied by the creation of another gradient or the "doing of work" of some kind. That is, while the usual law/rule says that you can't do work without degrading energy (increasing entropy), the converse is also true - you can't degrade energy (increase entropy) without doing work. I got this idea from Bob Ulanowicz. I think this is right on the money. The description of entropy is
only looking at a piece of time, it seems to me. Just as a sine wave has an "up"
phase and a "down" phase, in a repeating pattern that makes a characteristic
"wave"... if we took one little piece out of it to examine, extrapolating a law
of the universe from it, we might conclude that it's always "down"... What if we
currently only have perceptual access to "a piece" of the universe? I
think this is exactly the case, frankly. Granted, it's a bigger piece than what
we had prior to the development of technology, but does anyone in
science really believe that we've now "seen it all"?
DF: Glen mentioned the issues of the 2nd law only applying to
closed
systems yet the solar system is an open system.Thus if life does major work inside the solar system it would still be less energy than has been dissipated during the sun's radiation/decay. But if life could become independent of the solar system - leave and establish open-ended, living colonies elsewhere - this would seem to suggest an energy greater than or equal to that of the sun. That is, life would not be merely dependent on steady input of low entropy energy from the sun, but would have enough embodied or internal energy (?) to be able to disconnect from the sun's forcing across the Earth system boundary. It would maybe be like a smaller particle ejecting from an atom when excited or after absorbing added energy. But the energy does not come from outside the solar system, but inside. In that sense it seems the solar system is closed to solar/stellar energy of any real importance. Life does not use or harness energy from beyond the solar system, does it? Maybe cosmic rays are useful...hmmm... There are many aspects of this to discuss. For example, I would say
that life on Earth does, indeed, harness energy from beyond the solar
system. Our solar system depends on the rest of the universe for
its existence. Secondly, it seems to me that no system in this
universe can be a truly "closed system" (It bears reiterating
that this is not the same as a system organization having "closed
entailment loops")... But, if no system in this universe can be closed,
that would have to include the universe, itself, as a system, right? And
how can the universe be open if there's nothing "outside" it? Perhaps the
answer is that with relational causality, contextual issues can change
everything so, by definition, any new relation creates
contextual information and any change in a relation can create
additional information-- the equivalent of a new relation. All systems can be
said to possess an inherent relation to self. So, any change
in relations can simultaneously create a new relation between
the system prior to the change and the system after the change. This
involves aspects of, and information about, time.
Then there is the fact that humanity is stargazing; studying the
heavens, imagining scenarios which may have happened in Earth's distant past or
which may happen in the future... In response, we are developing all sorts of
technologies to try and better understand various threats to our planet and to
try and develop better opportunities for ourselves in terms of exploration, etc.
So, in a way, this is an interaction between life on Earth and energy from other
galaxies and solar systems, right?
DF: Matter seems conserved on Earth - no major gains or losses.
Yet life has increased embodied energy, complexity, biomass, relations, information, knowledge, etc. by iteration of composing and decomposing, combining and recombining material forms and processes in evolving configurations. No major gains on Earth? I would say that plant life has had a profound effect on the biosphere's complement of matter. Plants take energy from the sun and make sugar with it. Amazing alchemy! There is also the common hypothesis that all the asteroids and comets which have crashed onto Earth's surface have added up to a substantial gain in material. D.F. posted:
a quote by Martin Olomucki, from The Chemistry of Life: "When we attempt to define life, or living, we immediately come up against a fundamental and apparently irreducible paradox: living organisms are composed of inanimate molecules...Must we then say that 'life' is the interaction of all the inanimate components of this whole? In other words, that nothing is alive in a cell except the whole of it?" [end quote] cited from, read in Biogenesis - Theories of Life's Origin by Noam Lahav. I would agree with that assessment. Nothing is "alive" except the whole of it (where "it" is an organism). DF: So if as you say this same issue holds true for a cell or organism and I say it holds true for a community of cells or organisms (neither autotroph nor heterotroph alone is alive in the sense of capacity for sustained, indefinite, open-ended life), then it seems that the organizational, relational aspect as connected to life (from these two similar but different perspectives) spans these two scales of organization. Perhaps it spans more and is scale-independent like fractals or holograms? Autotrophs and heterotrophs are ways of labeling organisms, but
they don't define life. The development of one type of organism merely reflects
an environment as it existed when that type of organism came into being. If
there were other types of organisms already present in the environment, then the
information encoded into the "new" organism would simply reflect the
effects. How would any organism "know" which aspects of it's environment were
derived from, say, Earth's orbital mechanics and which were derived from
the activity of other organisms? I doubt that ANY system, including the
universe as a whole, has the capacity for sustained, indefinite, unchanging
organization. Change is the only constant. The fact that every living organism
is dependent on information from its evolutionary context is one of the
properties of life as Robert Rosen defined it. That's what enables
anticipation.
Organizational and relational aspects are not a by-product of life,
but of complexity. Relational complexity does, indeed, span all these aspects.
Judith
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