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A comment on Thoughts on Man's Purpose in Life (1977).

Re:Thoughts on Man's Purpose in Life (1977) by dredmorbius on Friday June 21, 2019 @07:26AM (#20241521)
"From the physicist's point of view, Man seems to have no function except that of dissipating or degrading energy."

-- Henry Brooks Adams, The Degradation of the Democratic Dogma.

https://archive.org/details/degradationofdem00adam/page/216

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Adams

Similar thoughts from Aldo Leopold, Howard Odum, Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, and many others.

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Re:Thoughts on Man's Purpose in Life (1977) by dqpb on Friday June 21, 2019 @07:53AM (#20241646)
That's wrong though. Our function is to reproduce. That is literally the reason life is a thing - and it is opposite of entropy.
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Re:Thoughts on Man's Purpose in Life (1977) by Sinergy2 on Friday June 21, 2019 @07:59AM (#20241668)
Reproduction is definitely a net increase in raw entropy. That's what is meant by "dissipating energy", I imagine.
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Re:Thoughts on Man's Purpose in Life (1977) by dqpb on Friday June 21, 2019 @08:21AM (#20241827)
Not information entropy
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Re:Thoughts on Man's Purpose in Life (1977) by raxxorrax on Friday June 21, 2019 @08:33AM (#20241907)
It sucks that the intuitive interpretation regarding both applications is completely inverted.
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