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Re:A New Physics Theory of Life (2014) by jbdistaken on Monday December 05, 2016 @02:29PM (#13108445)
>E.g. do the organisms dissipating more energy have better chances of survival?

in general, no. E.g., a child with a high fever will dissipate more energy than a child without a fever over the same time period. who is more likely to survive?

We can even consider a specific type of dissipation that an organism uses to store memories (longer lifetime of memory = less reversible = requires more dissipation), there's no guarantee that the memories stored will be useful for survival. storing a memory that lasts 100 years costs dissipation that could be better spent elsewhere for an organism that typically lives 1 week...

but with appropriate restrictions on what is meant by dissipation, organism, ... the timescales involved, the driving ... then the reverse statement can be true "more likely evolutionary outcomes" <among all possible trajectories of configurations of 'organisms'> "are going to be the ones that absorbed and dissipated more energy from the environment’s external drives on the way to getting there.”

Re:A New Physics Theory of Life (2014) by mike_ivanov on Monday December 05, 2016 @04:07PM (#13109583)
Let me reframe my question this way: given the child you mentioned, would he/she be better off in life if you construct and provide such a framework where that child could consume and dissipate more energy than other children?

That is, can we control (not just predict) the outcome by manipulating dissipation patterns?