Gravity is Energy
The laws of thermodynamics decree that each quantity of en^rgy has a characteristic quaUty called entropy associated with it. The entropy measures the degree of disorder associated with the energy. Energy must always flow in such a direction that the entropy increases. Thus, we can arrange the different forms of energy in an "order of merit," the highest form being the one with the least disorder or entropy. Energy of a higher form can be degraded into a lower form, but a lower form can never...
notes Living Things Renew Themselves
Renewal of Life by Transmission. The most notable distinction between living and inanimate things is that the former maintain themselves by renewal. A stone when struck resists. If its resistance is greater than the force of the blow struck, it remains outwardly unchanged. Otherwise, it is shattered into smaller bits. Never does the stone attempt to react in such a way that it may maintain itself against the blow, much less so as to render the blow a contributing factor to its own continued a...
1 The Problem of Energy
As a child, I read Friday by Robert A Heinlein, which portrayed a future in which energy needs are addressed by energy storage devices called "Shipstones", which are described as a way to pack more kilowatt-hours into a smaller space and a smaller mass than any other engineer had ever dreamed of. To call it an "improved storage battery" (as some early accounts did) is like calling an H-bomb an "improved firecracker."
In the novel, the Shipstone's eponymous inventor realised "that the problem... notesIsn't that is isn't plentiful. The sky is raining energy. It's that we have to collect it into buckets for use.
These are partial direct quotes, the direct quote is from a hacker news comment.
Life is "Enclaves" in a Whirlpool of Chaos
THE FOLLOWING IS QUOTED FROM BERGAN EVANS
ON NORBERT WEINER, NUCLEAR PHYSICIST
The second concept Wiener has to establish is that of entropy. Probability is a mathematical concept, coming from statistics. Entropy comes from physics. It is the assertion-- established logically and experimentally-- that the universe, by its nature, is "running down", moving toward a state of inert uniformity devoid of form, matter, hierarchy or differentiation.
That is, in any given situation, less organizat...
1 Life swirls in the opposite direction of increasing entropy in the Universe.
Partially Diminished Fraction of Ecosystems
Do you know the PDF of your shampoo? A PDF refers to a “partially diminished fraction” of an ecosystem, and if your shampoo contains palm oil cultivated on clear-cut jungle in Borneo, say, that value will be high. How about your shampoo’s DALY? This measure comes from public health: “disability-adjusted life years,” or the amount of one’s life that will be lost to a disabling disease because of, say, a lifetime’s cumulative exposure to a given industrial chemical. So if your fav... notesDaniel Goleman explains a concept for thinking about how our lives contribute to the increase of entropy in our biosphere.
Intelligence Arises out of a Need to Maximize Entropy
The researchers developed a software engine, called Entropica, and gave it models of a number of situations in which it could demonstrate behaviors that greatly resemble intelligence. They patterned many of these exercises after classic animal intelligence tests.
[...]
"It actually self-determines what its own objective is," said Wissner-Gross. "This [artificial intelligence] does not require the explicit specification of a goal, unlike essentially any other [artificial intelligence]."
...The more entropy, the more possibilities. Intelligence therefore seeks to maximize "future histories" in order to keep the number of possibilities maximized.
Entropy as a Purpose in Life
To the best of our knowledge, these tool use puzzle and
social cooperation puzzle results represent the rst successful completion of such standard animal cognition tests using
only a simple physical process. The remarkable spontaneous emergence of these sophisticated behaviors from such a
simple physical process suggests that causal entropic forces
might be used as the basis for a general—and potentially
universal—thermodynamic model for adaptive behavior.
Namely, adaptive behavior might ... notesResearchers have created an AI that self-directs itself into activities like balancing a ball on a stick or buying stocks low and selling high by simply programming it with the desire to maximize the "future histories" available to it (ie. if the ball drops or the AI runs out of money, then the possible futures are reduced to one in the simulation). This suggests a thermodynamic relationship between intelligence and disorder; that we might seek to maximize the entropy in our lives by staying alive, making money, getting educated, or otherwise increase the number of future histories available to us.
Intelligence as a Response to Entropy
Recent advances in fields ranging from cosmology
to computer science have hinted at a possible deep connection between intelligence and entropy maximization.
In cosmology, the causal entropic principle for anthropic
selection has used the maximization of entropy production
in causally connected space-time regions as a thermodynamic proxy for intelligent observer concentrations in the
prediction of cosmological parameters [1]. In geoscience,
entropy production maximization has been proposed a...Researchers create an AI that seeks to maximize its potential future histories and therefore tackles goals like playing the stockmarket and balancing balls on sticks because to let the money run out or the ball drop would reduce its potential future histories. Intelligence seeks to maximize entropy.
Life Works Against the Tide of Entropy
The harsh, demystifying light of science has left the modern biologist with one last miracle, a miracle of organization. Somehow, back in the planet's youth, molecules organized themselves into a structure that could reproduce itself. Dust quickened, and into an inanimate world came animation. All the rest has followed, the flight of the pelican, the fragrance of a baby's skin, the songs of wolf and whale. These latter developments are relatively recent and we know in a general way how they c...While everything else in the universe is trending toward disorder, life works against the trend.
Life Feeds on Negative Entropy
[A living organism] ... feeds upon negative entropy ... Thus the device by which an organism maintains itself stationary at a fairly high level of orderliness (= fairly low level of entropy) really consists in continually sucking orderliness from its environment.It sucks the orderliness from its environment.
