Posted on 12/28/2005 3:01:53 PM PST by johnnyb_61820
... the idea that the four fundamental forces of physics alone could rearrange the fundamental particles of nature into spaceships, nuclear power plants, and computers, connected to laser printers, CRTs, keyboards and the Internet, appears to violate the second law of thermodynamics in a spectacular way.
Anyone who has made such an argument is familiar with the standard reply: the Earth is an open system, it receives energy from the sun, and order can increase in an open system, as long as it is "compensated" somehow by a comparable or greater decrease outside the system. S. Angrist and L. Hepler, for example, in "Order and Chaos", write, "In a certain sense the development of civilization may appear contradictory to the second law.... Even though society can effect local reductions in entropy, the general and universal trend of entropy increase easily swamps the anomalous but important efforts of civilized man. Each localized, man-made or machine-made entropy decrease is accompanied by a greater increase in entropy of the surroundings, thereby maintaining the required increase in total entropy."
According to this reasoning, then, the second law does not prevent scrap metal from reorganizing itself into a computer in one room, as long as two computers in the next room are rusting into scrap metal -- and the door is open. In Appendix D of my new book, The Numerical Solution of Ordinary and Partial Differential Equations, second edition, I take a closer look at the equation for entropy change, which applies not only to thermal entropy but also to the entropy associated with anything else that diffuses, and show that it does not simply say that order cannot increase in a closed system. It also says that in an open system, order cannot increase faster than it is imported through the boundary. ...
(Excerpt) Read more at spectator.org ...
That is due to the energy regime involved; and for that matter, it is irrelevant as a practical matter to the biological underpinnings of ToE.
...oh, and either spellcheck is your friend, or you need to send your manuscript though the round of 10,000 monkeys again..
Cheers!
...and Cats was pretty good tonight, too.
G'night!
Please give an example of this.
What is there to defend?
Newton's laws of motion and gravity are true unless you're dealing with very high speeds or very large masses. Einstein's equations agree with Newton's for all "practical" purposes.
The real reason Newton's theory is no longer considered totally accurate is that experiments and measurements of natural phenomena more closely agree with Einstein than Newton. EG, the motion of Mercury.
Low pressure in space aside, haven't you noticed how...well, material the universe tends to be?
In other words, if biochemicals are computing machines, then you might want to treat the possibility that for that case too, as well as for silicon, the machine, the algorithm, and the data are distinct things as well.
Cheers!
Nor would Jewish men still need to be circumcised...
This has been happening for something like 4000 years..
Collect 'em, save 'em, trade 'em with your friends.
or...
"Your ass is glass" <--- doesn't have the same ring, does it?
Cheers!
Why, how did Roy treat his tiger that reflected (evoked) memories of Eden? (Eatin', perhaps, but not Eden.)
Cheers!
Gee, have you read the threads on Gödel? :-)
Cheers!
Or of anything else.
But what would I know? I am a solipcist.
So why am I posting? ;-)
Solipcism: There is only one existent being.
Why not go further than that?
There is no existent being.
Source, please? Have you spoken to the designers?
(And while you're at it, how do you know they weren't pulling your leg?)
Cheers!
Leave Brokeback Mountain out of this!
Cheers!
Any distinction we make between machine, program, and data is an illusion that serves us reasonably well if we do not look to closely. Much like Newtonian physics. If we are being strictly correct, there is no distinction between any of those terms. And like Newtonian physics, the more precision and correctness we require, the more the illusion fails us.
I have no problem separating machine from program from data when it is convenient, but I am well aware of the fact that the distinction is an artificial construct that works reasonably well in some cases and fails very badly in others. A man has got to know the limits of his models.
I don't think he's crazy, I think you are talking past each other.
The Genesis text about the breeding indicated that the peeled switches by the watering troughs got the animals horny, so they mated.
I never read the passage as indicating that the switches themselves affected the coloration of the offspring.
Try luck, divine providence, or paint.
Cheers!
999
Perhaps ironically, Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem, which I assume you are referring to, does not really apply. On one hand, we have those things that we can prove with the current set of axioms. On the other hand, we use those proofs to construct a contrary argument premised on non-axiomatic systems to which the Incompleteness Theorem does not apply.
The non-axiomatic nature is the source of the uncanny robustness of the contrary arguments. They do not assert correctness, which no reasonable person can assert (c.f. the Incompleteness Theorem), they merely assert a hypothesis with the highest probability of correctness which is outside the purview of the limitations of axiomatic systems e.g. Gödel.
If you really want to see something different, look into pervasively non-axiomatic computational systems, which have the unique ability to bypass most of the limitations of conventional computing models on conventional substrates. Premising any argument on axiomatic systems places limits that are not strictly necessary.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.