Posted on 01/28/2005 4:28:41 PM PST by metacognative
Im curious if a Law or Process could actually be called a Law or a Process if one attributes either to mindlessness? I realize this question is simplistic on the surface but so are the naturalistic answers i.e. They are natural laws and processes because they are from nature They are just a result of a mindless universe and laws and processes must emerge regardless or What a stupid question because you cannot relate laws or processes from intelligence to the natural (This is the common answer)
Honestly, if someone used our pre-existing laws and processes to make some novel design what would this prove other than the laws and processes we live under allow novel designs? Must we still assume that they ultimately came from mindlessness and assume that the purely mindless mechanisms resulted and caused the universe, DNA, consciousness, and our own (somewhat) intelligently designed laws and processes that we use to govern ourselves
Now although; selection, survival, fitness, etc. can be anthropomorphized I do not believe the same can be said of natural laws and processes because they must be used initially and regardless to set things in motion I would actually go on the record as saying that both a law and a process invoke teleology as I do not see how either could ultimately be a result of mindlessness and still be observed. A law and a process require information transfer and instructions to be carried out toward an end and from a beginning.
If someone asserts a TOE without a teleological shoe, it will be stubbed.
Heartlanders Law
Only if you think 'sole' means a kind of flatfish.
A thermodynamic mechanism, which utilizes outside energy, must cause this effect. The thermodynamic mechanism has to constrain the process over the cycle. The supposed Darwinian mechanism lacks the required precision.
'Thermodynamic mechanism' is akin to 'Clintonian honesty'. Until you get this point, guy, there is no point in arguing with you. Entropy is a state function. It depends on the final state, and the initial state, and nothing else on God's green earth.
No, you are misreading the statement. Refrigerators only cool their insides. The outside gets quite hot (that's the "other thing happening" which is necessary.) Similarly for heat pumps. What is forbidden is that a refrigerator only cool its surroundings and get 100% useful work out of the heat removed.
My post at 1773 goes into my assertions in more detail, but wrt your point concerning open systems, from the first link:
If one only looks at thermodynamic entropy there appears to be a clear violation in biological systems characterized by life itself and its emergence (autonomy, semiosis, order or complexification, etc.)
betty boop once used a thought experiment to demonstrate the difference between life, non-life and death. She said to take a live albatross, a 12 lb cannonball and a dead albatross to the Leaning Tower of Pisa and toss them over the side. The difference becomes obvious. Non-life and death are subject to thermodynamic entropy et al in one fashion - and life, in another.
To put it in mathematical terms, Shannon-Weaver to be exact, life is characterized by successful communications. In Shannon parlance that is the reduction of uncertainty in a receiver or molecular machine in going from a before state to an after state. Actually, Shannon used the term entropy instead of uncertainty but we avoid that around here because it can be confusing.
The bottom line is that as long as the molecular machinery is successfully communicating, there is life. When the successful communication stops, the organism is dead. There is no life where there is no successful communication.
In the Shannon model, information is not the message it is the action. The DNA is as good dead as alive. The elements in the Shannon-Weaver model are source, message, encoder, channel, noise, decoder, receiver. All of these exist in molecular machines.
This is not hype. It is an important area of cancer and drug research.
So just like the refrigerator is a machine designed to do something which seems to defy the 2nd Law yet nevertheless pays the tab for doing it the molecular machine also does something which seems to defy the 2nd Law and yet pays the tab for doing it. For each bit of information gained in a molecular machine in going from a before state to an after state, energy is dissipated into the local surroundings.
Heres the key, though and the thing which points to Intelligent Design. The refrigerator was designed and built by man. Life occurs in nature.
So the question that we ought to be asking is not about the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, but where did the information come from? What causes this successful communication?
To borrow a metaphor from Schutzenberger, its like the biologists and chemists are fumbling with their keys convinced that one of them will open the lock while the physicists and mathematicians are trying to tell them it is a combination lock.
The origin of information in biological systems is #2 on my list at post 1713.
The problem with Dembskis theory as with Manfred Eigens challenges to information theory and molecular biology is the very, very common misinterpretation of what information is.
In common-speak, information is the message. But that is inaccurate wrt to "information theory and molecular biology". Claude E. Shannon, the father of information theory describes information as the action, the successful communication, the reduction of uncertainty (entropy) in the receiver ---- not the message. In fact, the message is entirely beside the point which is the reason his theory is broadly applicable across many disciplines.
Here is the original Shannon theory: A Mathematical Theory of Communication
Schneider reduces it for us as follows:
--- Claude Shannon, A Mathematical Theory of Communication, Part III, section 20, number 3
In the Shannon-Weaver model, what Dembski and others call "information" is the "message" or "information content". Applying it to biological systems, that would put the focus on the DNA or RNA - whereas the actual dissipation of energy into the local surroundings (thermodynamics) is the consequence of the reduction of uncertainty or entropy - the communication (activity of state change).
The DNA and RNA are evidence of the semiosis, the encoding/decoding - the functional complexification in biological systems. That is a most significant area of investigation to be sure, but the greater mystery is the communication itself.
I posted the following to an earlier thread to help explain the difference:
Your reaction to the alleged exchange above is instructive, WildTurkey. Where you see evidence of a cabal forming for the purpose of perpetrating a fraud on science, all I see is an inside joke shared by two great professional mathematicians. Still, the phrase entropy nobody understands it anyway has a certain resonance.
So maybe we should just try to understand it? And especially it seems we need to understand how it works in living systems. Living systems are information-driven systems, and entropy is a key facilitator of this process. It turns out information and entropy are directly correlated terms: The more complex the (self-organizing) living system, the greater its need for information and, thus, the greater its need to accumulate high entropy.
To put this into perspective, Paul Davies [The Fifth Miracle, 1998] writes:
The laws of physics are algorithmically very simple; they contain relatively little information. Consequently they cannot on their own be responsible for creating informational macromolecules life cannot be written into the laws of physics . Life works its magic not by bowing to the directionality of chemistry, but by circumventing what is chemically and thermodynamically natural. Of course, organisms must comply with the laws of physics and chemistry, but these laws are only incidental to biology.
Thus we have an apparent paradox: Living systems must simultaneously circumvent and comply with the laws of physics and chemistry. But the paradox dissolves when we see that it is by paying their entropy debt that living systems can do this. And pay it they must, for the balance equation of the second law DS = 0 [note: that "D" really ought to be the Greek symbol, Delta, which refers to a probability distribution. But after all this time I still don't know how to make one in HTML. Guess i should go look it up. :^)] requires it (which might be translated, for any given system of whatever type, as the change in entropy equals zero).
Rod Swenson explains the balance equation this way: Where any form of energy (e.g., mechanical, chemical, electrical, or energy in the form of heat) is out of equilibrium with its surroundings, a potential exists that the world acts spontaneously to minimize.
In other words, you cant just look at a thermodynamic object as if it were somehow discrete, isolatable from its environment. The point of the second law is to predict the behavior of a system precisely in the context of its physical environment, an environment that ultimately extends to the entire universe. For the second law of thermodynamics, like the first, is a universal law. Yet unlike the first, the second law is not time-reversible. The arrow of time moves inexorably in only one direction, towards the future. Along the way (so to speak), it is the nature of entropy to inexorably increase, DS > 0. Speaking globally, were entropy to max out, the result would be a universe in thermal equilibrium, a world in a state of maximum disorder in which nothing above the particle level would exist. Applied to the case of an individual living system, the result would be heat death: It would cease to live.
It has been said that the first law of thermodynamics the law of energy conservation unifies all real-world processes, and expresses the underlying symmetry principle of the natural world. As such, it is the law of that which does not change. The second law, on the other hand, is the law of that which changes. Hold that thought for now (well return to it shortly), and lets look at the thermodynamic behavior of a simple self-organizing system and see what we can figure out.
I propose we look at Bernard cells. Youll recall earlier I said that the Boltzmann hypothesis of the second law has been broadly understood as a law of disorder. In effect, as Swenson notes, he reduced the second law to the stochastic collisions of mechanical particles, or a law of probability. Apparently, Boltzmann reasoned that in a world of mechanically colliding particles, disordered states would be the most probable. Swenson writes of Boltzmanns view, There are so many more possible disordered states than ordered ones that a system will almost always be found either in the state of maximum disorder, the macrostate with the greatest number of accessible microstates such as a gas in a box at equilibrium, or moving towards it. A dynamically ordered state, one with molecules moving at the same speed and in the same direction, said Boltzmann, is the most improbable case conceivable an infinitely improbable configuration of energy.
Yet a living system is a highly complex, self-organizing system meaning that, at minimum, it requires molecules to move together and in the same direction. Thus the Boltzmann regime does not appear to be applicable to such cases. At bottom, a living system is not a mechanistic one. And the end-directedness of a living system to organize, maintain, and conserve life runs exactly counter to the end-directedness of the second law: maximum disorder, extinction of potentials, heat death.
The Bernard cell presents an instructive case. For it demonstrates a state in which gangs of molecules move together and in the same direction that is, it is an organized, some say self-organized system, provided it has an energy (heat) source above a certain critical threshold. Clearly, a Bernard cell does not behave like Boltzmanns gas in a box.
Let me try to describe Claude Bernards experiment. It consists of a circular dish holding a viscous liquid in between a uniform heat source below and the cooler ambient air above. The difference between the temperature below and the temperature above constitutes a potential called thermodynamic Force F, whose magnitude is determined by the difference between the two temperatures; i.e., between the source (the heat source below) and the sink (the ambient air). The heat gradient between the heat source below and the sink above is what constitutes the potential which, once the heating temperature reaches a certain minimum threshold, becomes sufficient to motivate flows within the system that take the form of Bernard cells. We observe the development of an ordered flow that moves hot fluid up from the bottom of the dish through the center up to the top surface where it is cooled by the air, then moves it down the sides where it pulls in more potential as it moves across the bottom again, then rises through the center again, and the cycle repeats. If the heating temperature of the source falls below the minimum threshold, this activity ceases, and the Boltzmann regime takes over.
If all this sounds really complicated, well you might say that any cook who has ever made a gravy, or a sauce béchamel, has observed this experiment in its gross aspect. Its called: boiling.
The take-away from Bernards experiment is that any ordered flow must function to increase the rate of entropy production of the system-plus-environment, pulling in sufficient resources and then dissipating them, thus satisfying the balance equation of the second law. As Heraclitus might put it, that which persists does so as the result of ceaseless change.
Schroedinger makes this explicit; for he says that living systems must produce entropy (minimize potentials) at a sufficient rate to compensate for their own internal ordering (which can be measured as distance from equilibrium) which is what preserves the system in its particular form thus to satisfy the second laws balance equation.
To put this matter very, very crudely, for a thing to be what it is, it has to lose all potential for being anything else. Entropy is that which dissipates the unneeded potentials. Thus, the more complex and ordered a system is, the more entropy it requires. And this is the reason why people say that living systems must pay their entropy debt.
In living systems, entropy the dissipation of potentials generally takes the form of heat radiated out to the external environment.
So, what does any of this have to do with Shannon entropy? Shannon entropy is a term for a quantity isolated in Shannons theory of information. I understand the term to refer in a directly analogous way to thermodynamic entropy in terms of its function or role. We might say it refers to potential information that is not selected upon the successful communication of a message, success being defined as the reduction of uncertainty in the receiver that moves the living system from a before state to the after state best serving biological interests. And analogously to the case of thermodynamic entropy, the more decisions the living system makes (which are what reduce uncertainty in the system), the more Shannon entropy there has to be. All the paths not taken are dissipated; that is, they have no force.
At least thats what the situation looks like to me. Call it a hypothesis, and then anyone who wants to falsify it can take a stab at it. Im keenly interested in entertaining other views of the matter.
Sorry to be so long in replying, but I'm simply buried in work these days. And am so behind in answering my correspondance that i am on the brink of despair. Thanks for writing, WildTurkey.
A biological form is low entropy and you do not "accumulate high entropy".
Yes; and it seems in all cases the common answer is an exercise in circular reasoning. It's like a snake biting its own tail....
BTW, I don't thing it's "simplistic" to seek after the most simple, basic explanation of phenomena we observe. After all, isn't this what scientific laws and principles seek to do?
Thanks so much for writing, Heartlander.
deltaS = zero only in reversible processes. All natural processes are non-reversible. I think you need a class in thermo-dynamics.
WT, please lay out the evidence that backs up your assertion, or I might have to begin assuming that you are a "hopeless case."
I think I see your problem.
And that would be....?????
You many assume me "hopeless" but I am correct.
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.