Re: The wirehead problem

Tim Tyler <seemysig@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Curt Welch wrote:

Is the purpose of a river to maximize entropy? Is the purpose of a
rock to maximize entropy?

In rivers, maximising entropy is an illuminating perspective.
For example, it explains why rivers move straight when running fast,
and meander when loaded with silt and moving over flood plains. In
the former case, they are trying to get to the ocean quickly. In
the latter, they scour the landscape - in order to pick up small
rock particles, in order to degrade their potential energy.

In the context of rocks, they don't really have any "degrees of freedom",
or much in the way of behaviour. Roll them down a hill and entropy
maximisation becomes a useful idea again.

I'll have to think about these ideas some more.

It is very true that higher life forms tend to assist the flow of
energy. But they do it because it's a survival tool for them. It's an
arms race against the other survival structures. If you can control
energy flow, you can keep the energy flow from causing your
destruction, and use it to cause the destruction of other structures
that might want to do the same to you. There is no general need to
maximize energy flow. It's just the fact that the more energy you can
control, the more likely you are to "win" the arms race. We see this
happen very much at our macro level of existence as we fight over
control of oil and food for example. But it happens all the way down
the line of complexity when we see organisms using energy to create
more copies of themselves. They regulate the flow of energy to make it
produce more copies of themselves from surrounding material, instead of
letting the surrounding material use the same energy, to do the same to
them.

"Survival" is a bit vague. It needs to be made clear that there's
an impetus towards growth and reproduction, as well as not dying.

There is no "impetus towards growth and reproduction". There is nothing
there to be "made clear" in my view.

The concept of survival is not vague to me. I describe it as "survival of
structure". It works because at our level of existence (these temperatures
and pressures), matter is conserved. Survival of structure means survival
of the structure of mater. The forces of nature naturally causes matter to
form into structures until enough energy comes along to change it to a
different structure. Electrons and protrons form into atoms. Atoms bound
into chemical compounds, etc etc.

As energy flows through these structures, they can change into different
forms.

Survival of structure just points out that some of the structures matter
can get itself into tends to survive (persist) longer than other
structures.

Atoms are very persistent little buggers. They are very good at surviving.
They don't really have any power to reproduce that I know of (though it
wouldn't surprise me to find that some atoms do actually have some power to
reproduce - aka cause other atoms near them to restructure into matching
atoms).

As you move up in scale to molecules and other more complex structures, you
find a wide range of different characteristics which can help the structure
survive.

Some structures as you point out have the power to reproduce - which means
they can take near-by matter, and force it to change structure to match the
structure of the source object. The source object will actually "kill" the
structure what was in the other object, and turn it into a copy of the
structure.

All higher level concepts of survival translate down to this same low level
idea of survival of structures.

All to often, these types of debates are limited to looking at what we like
to call "life". That's just totally bogus in my view because there is
nothing special about "life" other than the fact that it's a series of very
complex structures that happen to be good at surviving.

To understand evolution, you can't look only at those structures we like to
call life. You have to look at the evolution of all structures in the
universe.

When we do that, we find that reproduction is in fact only a survival tool
used by a very small sub-set of all matter in the universe. Most structure
in the universe survives without reproduction at all. Most the atoms on
the earth, have been here since the earth was first formed 4 billion years
ago (I think). As I understand it, they were formed in stars that burned
out billions of years ago. The atoms are far far better at surviving than
any other structure here and they don't use reproduction at all to do it.

Reproduction is just one of many techniques more complex structures take
advantage of to help them survive. Arms and legs are another trick some of
the more complex structures use. They list of reasons different structures
are able to survive (the tricks they use to say "alive"), is nearly
unlimited. reproduction is just one of a million tricks used.

Maximising entropy explains things like why gases expand to fill
a box. It's hard to say the same for "survival".

No, you have it backwards there.

Entropy doesn't explain anything, It's the word (concept really) we made up
to _describe_ the fact that gases expand to fill a box. It's not the
reason it happens. You are putting the cart before the horse by trying to
explain the effect using the name we made up to label the effect.

I write a bouncing ball app in java which can be found here:

http://newsreader.com/java/

You can add a lot of balls into the system and you can grab a ball with the
mouse and wave it around to stir up all the other balls (add energy into
the system).

You can see with that the balls tend to "fill up the box" fairly evenly
when you you add energy. Energy is lost in every collision and there is
gravity at work, so when you leave it alone, the balls all settle to the
bottom in time. But when you stir them up by grabbing one and waving it,
it fills the box again.

This doesn't happen because I wrote code to make it obey the laws of
entropy. It happens because I gave the balls mass and programmed in
conservation of momentum in the collisions.

Entropy is a high level effect we use to explain the behavior of balls, but
it is not a reduction that can explain the _cause_ of the effect. As such,
it's not useful to try and make the argument that the gas expands _because_
_of_ entropy. Instead, gas expands because of what naturally happens when
gas molecules collide with one another in a 3D space. The energy
(momentum) of the the particles statistically tends to spread out evenly
across the gas, and the mass per space of the gas tends to spread out
evenly as well.

It's the spreading of energy which we describe as a decrease in entropy.
But the energy in the universe doesn't spread out because of entropy. It
spreads out because of how atomic particles interact with each other in our
universe.

To say that entropy always increases, is just a fancy way of saying that
energy likes to spread out and equalize over space.

To say that the purpose of life is to increase entropy is also turning it
all upside down and backward. "Life" is what results as energy spreads out
- like a wave is a structure which results as energy from a rock dropping
in a pond spreads out. Life doesn't create entropy, the spreading of
energy is what creates all structure in the universe.

--
Curt Welch http://CurtWelch.Com/
curt@xxxxxxxx http://NewsReader.Com/
.

Relevant Pages

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