Sometimes one needs a h1 tag to make a point. On the one hand, I'm sure I was rude. On the other hand, I've tried, in my inept way, to be subtle in the past, and it's made no impact.
Now that we have that straight, I would like to know your opinion of my contention that Boltzmann's conception of the second law as a law of disorder is not an exhaustive basis for the investigation of biological systems, which seem to be characterized by the ability to manifest higher and higher degrees of self-organization. Boltzmann's experiments with classical gasses apparently did not indicate this type of behavior.
It's not an exhaustive basis for the description of biological systems. Biological systems are not equilibrium systems, and are far more complex than can be fully described by thermodynamic variables (which an ideal gas could, BTW). However, a living system does have a single thermodynamic entropy, which is unremarkable in comparison, say with a comparable mass of protein DNA and water. That thermodynamic entropy is in principle measurable (though we tend to avoid doing calorimetry on bodies) It is calculable, in principle, from first principles. We have decent values for entropies of proteins and other biological components in water and other aqueous media. Stat. mech. has come a long way since ideal gases. Most of all, however, there is nothing mysterious or unusual about it. It is not the font of some mystical order unique to life; it's just a quantity, like the temperature, or the energy, or the heat emitted.
I have no problem with people speculating about what unusual properties life may have. Certainly there must be some properties unique to life. I don't even think we have the alphabet to talk about those properties yet. However, whatever those properties are, they have nothing to do with the thermodynamic entropy. To mystify the entropy is to give credence to the specious arguments that somehow the Second Law says something about evolution. I feel the same way about quantum mechanics; while QM may seem mystical and exotic to people outside physics, it's really quite mundane, and in my not so humble opinion, if you're going to build a theory of biological complexity, QM won't be a foundation for it.
Let me explain why this irritates me. One of the things I do for a living is calculating ensemble properties using stat. mech.; I also do quite a bit of QM. That means I think it, I teach it, I direct research on it; I publish papers on it. If I didn't love it from the start, in the manner of an arranged marriage, I have developed a strong affection by now. It annoys me when people say things about it that aren't true, or use it to argue what IMO are specious points; and it annoys me that people think you can approach it casually and generate conclusions without going to through the details of how it works.
Speculate all you want. It's harmless; it may even be valuable. Just don't try to tie your speculations to well-established scientific ideas which don't need to to be make look mysterious when they're not. If life or consciousness were based on stat. mech or Q.M., we'd have figured them out decades ago.
It's funny, I just had a discussion with a visiting colloquium spaker about this; she was describing some research on the very complicated molecular motions a single protein kinase does when it's fulfilling its biological role. She was recounting how one of my colleagues got annoyed with the detailed description of the molecular mechanism, which is just one of thousands of very complicated and different mechanisms, which all interact with each other in other even more complicated ways. Most of us think they are complicated because there are literally trillions of different things even a moderate sized protein molecule can do, and so over a billion years life has selected many different ways of doing things. And the question is, when you've described all this vast clockwork, is there more to it than just the details? He thought there should be; he wanted some great insight, some ghost in the machine (oddly enough, he's a fairly rabid atheist.)
The answer is, we don't know if there is more than the details. But I think we're not yet in a position to ask the right questions. And trying to claim it's just billiard balls ignores the incredible detail of what those billiard balls get up to. Given natural selection, a simple set of rules can create the most fabulously complicated things. That may be all there is.
End of homily.
That's beautifully put. It reminds me of what Darwin said at the end of Origin of Species, 6th edition:
There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone circling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.I don't know how it all got started, but anyone who thinks this isn't awe-inspiring is really missing out.
Thank you for your beautiful “homily,” RWP. I’m truly grateful for it. In it you said many things which sounded the ring of truth to my ear. I’d like to offer a few comments, FWTW.
First of all, in the interest of full and fair disclosure, I am not a scientist, nor have I ever held myself out to be such. In all likelihood, I was born a philosopher, and will die a philosopher; a leopard cannot change his spots. But that is not to say that I undervalue science. On the contrary, even though in my formal academic career I tried to avoid the sciences wherever possible, later in life I have found science, especially physics, to be irresistibly attractive, compelling in terms of the usages of my personal time. I have tried to correct the deficiencies of my formal education at every opportunity since. Still, there are gaps, I admit. But gaps are there to fill, and that’s what I’m about.
Having said that, with my philosopher’s hat on here, it seems to me that the sciences face daunting epistemological challenges these days. One is the sheer fact of the proliferation of specialties, and the concomitant enormous proliferation of increasingly detailed knowledge within specialties. The second derives from the first: It becomes increasingly difficult for specialists to integrate the body of their work into more integrated wholes, for that would require a familiarity with all the other specialties, and there is not enough time in a life to do that anymore (if there ever was). I don’t know whether you would agree with me, but I think that’s a serious problem.
I gather Bohr’s answer was simply to say that science was only about making good descriptions of nature, not about “explaining” nature. And actually I admire that attitude. But that still leaves a whole lot of “’splaining to do.” Or so it seems to me. You cited the on-point case of your colloquium speaker, who seemed to intimate that there must be a “ghost in the machine.” Personally, I don’t think there is a ghost in the scientific sense – for there are no ghosts in science. The point is, your atheist ghost-seeker is probably looking, not for some kind of Deus ex machina operation in nature, but an ultimate principle that ties absolutely everything together. As you wrote,
… the question is, when you've described all this vast clockwork, is there more to it than just the details? He thought there should be; he wanted some great insight, some ghost in the machine (oddly enough, he's a fairly rabid atheist.)
I don’t find this at all remarkable. There is something about human nature that just demands there should be some ultimate principle to explain and validate the physical laws and the evolution of the universe, and then demands to know what it is. The great interest in developing a GUT or a TOE demonstrates this.
And so you have this weirdo philosopher out here, “speculating.” (That would be me.)
In the italics at the top, you mentioned you have strong doubts that QM could have little to contribute to the solution of the problem of life, and that entropy is an expression given in some kind of a quasi-mystical terms. (My interpretation, times two; correct me please if I’ve “gone off the reservation” here).
Well, I don’t know about QM per se, which places everything in terms of a probability distribution. (BTW, does such a probability distribution contain only those terms which are knowable to the human mind, or might such a distribution contain yet-unknown or possibly unknowable elements?) But for me the great attraction of quantum theory is its penchant for reducing all the operative terms of the universal process into discrete items; e.g., space as Planck length, time as Planck time; the photon as discrete particle (although we know it also has a waveform under certain conditions); the Lorenz transformability of mass and energy, gravity in terms of graviton, etc.). Now it seems that information theory also has a “discrete particle,” the bit. So I wonder whether we might have the beginnings of a “common language” here capable of associating like terms in fruitful, meaningful ways?
And I do wonder about entropy, whether it has, as you say, a “mystical property.” You wrote: “To mystify the entropy is to give credence to the specious arguments that somehow the Second Law says something about evolution.” I dunno, RWP; but it seems to me that, absent entropy, no evolution of the universe itself, nor of any of its constituent systems, living or non-living, could occur in the first place.
If entropy seems to have a quasi mystical quality, perhaps that might be due to the fact that it specifies a “negative quantity.” Maybe science can take such abstractions quite in stride in the formulation of its equations, but to a philosopher, a “negative quantity” is noteworthy in principle. Especially since what entropy is usually taken to mean is the amount of thermal energy not available to perform useful work. Thus in living systems, which seemingly must perform a whole heck of an amount of useful work just to stay living, this would seem to be an important quantity.
As you noted, there seems to be little interest in the scientific community at the present time in trying to quantify entropy in living systems. And yet it seems that a very loose consortium of scientists of many different disciplines have come together in recent times trying to explicate the role of entropy in living systems. Unfortunately, I know of no scientist of note of American extraction who is participating in this effort, which seems to largely come from the national academies of science of such countries as Hungary, Israel, India, and China. The lack of American participation in this project (as informal as it is, since I imagine that each of the scientists involved has his own theory in view, yet the common thread tying them all together is the methods used) is deeply distressing to me. For whatever that is worth!
Well I’ve ranted enough by now for an evening. Thanks for listening, RWP.
More importantly than that, however, thank you ever so much for sharing your thoughts with me. I am in your debt.