It raised a point I hadn't ever considered - I'd be interested to hear your thoughts: How does the instinct for self-preservation comport with the Second Law?
It raised a point I hadn't ever considered - I'd be interested to hear your thoughts: How does the instinct for self-preservation comport with the Second Law?PMFJI, but my reading of the 2LoT implies that all living things must eat. This is because we must do physical work to keep chaos at bay within our bodies. But all physical work requires energy. The 2LoT says that you get usable energy by tapping into the natural tendency of energy to flow from a concentrated to a dissipated state. So we eat things that are made up of organic chemicals, and then our metabolism releases the energy in these chemicals in such a way that we can tap into the flow of energy as they're transformed into what we call "waste" products.
There's also a theory that since living things need to produce this flow of energy to survive, we are more effective promoters of the universe's drive towards total entropy than nonliving things, and so the 2LoT actually encourages life to exist.