Posted on 01/14/2011 5:57:52 PM PST by topcat54
Dear Sister in Christ,
Please allow me a brief respite from doing battle with the onerous RINORick Perry to "revise and extend" your remark:
"...everything that lives selectively transforms disorder[ed input] into order -- and increases disorder by ejecting the remainder as heat, respiratory effluvia, excreta, etc... . Everything that dies moves from order to disorder."
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Picky, picky PChemist... '-)
bb: I haven't gone back far enough into the thread to catch the real thrust of your statement, but, from experience, I expect that you are correct, too. Probably what we have is a clash between a statement concerning system totality vs your view that slices the temporal sequence more finely...
Not exactly. Life extrudes that excess entropy so that it can continue living, growing and existing. That entropy is exported to the rest of the universe.
bb: I haven't gone back far enough into the thread to catch the real thrust of your statement, but, from experience, I expect that you are correct, too. Probably what we have is a clash between a statement concerning system totality vs your view that slices the temporal sequence more finely...
Not just temporal - but spacial, as well. I create excess heat now; I get rid of it to the environment now. Or I will die; same for the wastes of digestion and metabolisation.
Sorry, didn’t intend to exclude the rest of you... :-{
Again, where does this "scientific basis" come from — without you having to invoke metaphysics by way of explanation???
From where I sit, the life principle is "at war" with the so-called "entropic principle" as articulated by "science."
Which is hardly to say that I hold "science" worthless, to be held in contempt.
I am only saying — or trying to say — that science can only get at problems that can be "measured."
It turns out that any such notion as "life principle" is immeasurable in scientific methodological terms.
Does this mean that there really is "no Life" in the universe of human experience, existentially discerned by human souls?
Oh, I forget. There are people nowadays who tend to argue that human beings are just machines anyway. And so have no possible "use" for "souls."
Still that answer doesn't "answer," as far as I'm concerned. For one thing, even if human beings were only "machines," they would still need a "program" in order to function in any kind of productive, beneficial way.
It all boils back to the seemingly eerie fact that the cosmos is indeed ordered; but not in such a way as to preclude the human search for understanding of its order.
Somehow Man seems to be the "free agent" of all the splendor and chaos of our present time....
Any chemical reaction can only proceed if entropy increase exceeds zero. We are chemical beings, fuelled by chemical processes. None of our processes may violate the laws of thermodynamics. I don't know where you may be, but my body and all of its physical processes are firmly ensconced in the physical world.
It all boils back to the seemingly eerie fact that the cosmos is indeed ordered; but not in such a way as to preclude the human search for understanding of its order.
Gonna throw thermodynamic laws out the cosmic window?
As bb implied, once that active, structured organization ceases at death, entropy approaches totality.
It is not an equation; it is an inequality. The decrease in entropy of a localized volume of space-time must be less than the resultant increase in entropy of the rest of the universe.
While I admit that the localized observation may see decreased entropy, the increase to the rest of the universe will be greater than that decrease.
As bb implied, once that active, structured organization ceases at death, entropy approaches totality.
Negative. The results of death are stable particles, plus resultant energies (heat, etc.). In order to achieve the maximum entropy for that death, all matter has to be transformed into random energies.
I invite anyone who does not believe entropy to be the eventual physical victor to examine any old auto salvage yard -- or my Jeep, which spent several winters on salty New England roads. (The rear bumper recently fell completely off when I hit a big bump while "four-wheeling" on my "back fifty"...) '-)
But that Jeep didn't weld its own bumper back on; I did that -- by adding more metal to fabricate new mounting brackets.
And as an archaeologist, I can attest that I have seen human burials in acid soil that left little remaining evidence other than the disturbed soil of the burial pit -- and a vague stain at the bottom -- plus a few stone or pottery "grave goods". Entropy is the eventual physical victor...
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But, as I understand it, bb is not confining her discussion to the purely physical...
Wish I had time to stay and join bb's side of the disciussion, but political battles need fighting...
Mark: What we are talking about is that life, like every other process, produces entropy — from a scientific basis.
Spirited: We know entropy exists by its’ discernable effects, yet we cannot see entropy itself anymore than we can see gravity. We know life exists because we “live,” as do animals and plant life. We know life exists but we cannot see life. We know that light exists, yet we cannot empirically prove its’ existence. We might try pointing to a light bulb, but light bulbs are not light. They are conveyers of light. Processes exist. We know they do by their effects, yet we cannot see processes anymore than we can see power. If Mark was required to empirically demonstrate that he dreams, he could not do so even though he knows he dreams.
Your understanding is totally correct TXnMA! I'm not speaking merely of the physical. There are all kinds of "phenomenal things" in the world that are not "physical." Spirited irish gave some great examples here.
And certainly I am not denying the Second Law of Thermodynamics, as MarkBsnr seems to be suggesting!
I'd only wish to point out that the Hungarian theoretical biologist Ervin Bauer has noticed something very interesting about life forms of all descriptions: While living, they appear to try to maintain maximal distance from entropy. Death occurs when they can no longer do that.
So, the vitally interesting question, "What is Life?"
It seems to me Life itself is not "physical," though it implements organic physicality, if I might put it that way.
It ain't something science is ever going to isolate by means of its own methods.
Which only says to me that the methods and techniques of science, as superb as they are, do not reach to all the important questions of human and cosmic existence.
[What political battle are you fighting now, dear brother in Christ? I wish you had time to stay, too! :^)]
Thank you ever so much for writing, dear TXnMA!
Since we are talking about entropy, I'll use Information Theory and Molecular Biology as an example.
In Shannon's mathematical theory of communications (the foundation theory of the field of mathematics known as information theory) - information is the reduction of uncertainty (Shannon entropy) in the receiver or molecular machine as it moves from a before state to an after state.
Further, the thermodynamic entropy tab is paid (increased) by heat dissipating into the local environment when the Shannon entropy is decreased.
Perfect balance.
Thank you so very much for sharing your insights, dearest sister in Christ!
And possibly also suggestive of an amazingly elegant "interface" between the non-physical (i.e., "spiritual") and physical worlds. Just an idea that occurred to me....
Perhaps such an idea would be resisted by scientists as smacking of metaphysics or some other "subjective" modality of analysis/interpretation. But the problem of how the immaterial can affect/effect the material — which definitely seems to be the observational case, based on developments in information theory and complex systems theory, not to mention common sense — will not go away.
In short, it appears that tangible things arise from intangible causes. The problem is, it seems to me, that we never observe "causes" (because of their sheer intangibility), only "effects."
That is, only effects are observables; thus only effects are accessible to the scientific method.
The great skeptic philosopher David Hume outright says that the connection between a cause and its effect is not ever something that can be demonstrated. To put it another way, there is no observable evidence of such a connection, no observable/demonstrable "facts" between a cause and its putative effect. Thus, the cause–effect relation is something we take on faith. For Hume, the very attribution of causes is an act of ex post facto induction which is then passed on and publicly accepted, in due course becoming "conventional."
Well, that's how Hume tells the tale! Though I find him a remarkably attractive human being in so many respects, I think he was too much a "child of the Enlightenment" on this question — the Enlightenment which basically has shed so precious little light.... He is heir to the Baconian scientific revolution, which bottom-line marks the profound shift from deductive to inductive analytical methods.
But it seems to me the current development of theoretical biology is not helped by recourse to such abstractions. Nowadays in theoretical biology, the issue of the "interface" between information (non-physical) and biological function (physical) is commanding considerable attention.
But what is science to do in this situation? The current state of theoretical biology seems to be catching on to the idea of biological function as an end-directed and purposeful, not a "random," phenomenon. The problem seems to be: If there is purpose in biology — informed purpose at that — Whose "purpose" is it?
It seems Science definitely does not want to "go there"....
I think a way out of this epistemological impasse has been well proposed by Jacob Needleman, Professor of Philosophy at San Francisco State, and once-upon-a-time clinical psychologist:
...[T]here exists a world of ideas — ideas which are of an astonishingly different quality from the concepts and theories of science, yet which retain the element of objectivity. [Scientists] are being asked to use their mind, that mind which has led them through the problems of their scientific investigations — yet it is not the same mind, not the same part of the mind. They try with their scientific, familiar mind to answer the questions of philosophy, but it is not possible. (It is not possible to approach the questions of philosophy with the scientific/scholarly mind alone: that is what academic philosophy does not understand.) Some of them attempt to convert the questions to intellectual problems, but I know that at the other end of the problem they find the question still waits for them.... The scientist, the student of science, comes from his laboratory where he has attempted to abandon the hindrances of subjectivity and emotion in order to see the real world. In front of authentic philosophy, he is astonished to find that the emotion evoked in him by great ideas is actually the same thing as freedom from emotion. — The Heart of Philosophy, 1982, p. 12–13.Thank you ever so much, dearest sister in Christ, for sharing your beautiful insights!
Non-physical world? ... First God created the dimensions, then He used light to get physical things going. Anything in God’s universe will have a where/when realm, whether we can now sense it or not. You might be better off stating non-visual, as in non-visual with our present physical configuration. But Jesus has told us that He is preparing a place for us and He shall come again to take us ‘there’, to that where/when. We have hints of that possibility with the fifth chapter in Daniel, the Old Testament/Tanakh. Whomever wrote on Belshazzar’s wall at palace party central was in a where/when and reached into Belshazzar’s where/when. Angels exist in some sort of where/when.
Certainly I think so, dear brother in Christ!
They are not as spatio/temporally remote from us as we may think....
JMHO. FWIW.
In short, it appears that tangible things arise from intangible causes. The problem is, it seems to me, that we never observe "causes" (because of their sheer intangibility), only "effects."
And as you further explain, only the physical had been recognized for the purposes of "doing" science until very recently.
I'm very grateful for the mathematicians and physicists who have been invited to the biologists' tables.
Thank you so very much for your superb essay-post, dearest sister in Christ!
And few if any of the most thoughtful doctors in the history of the Church have believed in a complex multiple-2nd-coming scheme, as cooked up by the Millerites in the 1830s—and so popular today.
Lets see,
Jesus comes secretly, rapturing the Church, (1st 2nd Coming)
Next He comes either in the middle or end of the Great Tribulation to stop the Beast et al. from wrecking His plans and in this He is saving the Jews(2nd 2nd Coming)
Then Jesus sets up His Millennial Kingdom on Earth (headed by the Jews-for-Jesus or ?) (2nd or 2nd & 1/2, or 3rd, 2nd Coming)
After 1000 years the Devil is released messing up things again, and FINALLY Jesus puts a stop to all this, (3rd or 4th 2nd Coming) bringing the Last Judgement and Heaven on Earth (but wait, the White Throne judgement is in there somewhere too...hmmmm, soooooooo complicated!).
Golly, can’t Jesus just simply come, raise the dead, judge the world, and establish His reign once and for all?!!! (Well, yes, that’s exactly what the Bible teaches-—and the vast majority of Christians everywhere have believed for 2000 years...)
If you go to scripture, go "as a child," innocent and without preconceived notions. If you open your bible with the goal of proving or disproving some preconceived idea that you either want to prove or disprove, that is not the childlike heart of a true seeker.
Neither God nor His Holy Spirit will bless this endeavor with divine enlightenment. Neither should believers publicly argue (in forums such as this) over fine points of disagreement. This can lead astray young believers, and discourage those who might otherwise be seekers.
We are told to not behave in this manner. Read your bible. Grow up.
;-\
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