yes, the 2nd law applies within closed systems. You can cheat in reality (where closed systems don't actually exist) by taking energy from outside a bounded territory (say, a human body) and using it to resist entropy. He doesn't call it by name, but he's referencing autopoiesis (or, continuous self-creation) and homeostasis (self-regulation of properties through balancing feedback loops). Both of these processes consume energy (leading to overall entropy increase), but you can nick that energy from the "environment" through food or photosynthesis or whatever.

Which means that ordered systems must create disorder in order to maintain their own order, and the place where you find the greatest order to disorder is in other actively ordered systems. I blame entropy for the existence of evil, if there is a sentient omniscient creator, there better be a good reason for it, and if the reason turns out to be that entropy is the ongoing cost of His omniscient observation of every interaction, The tax of Her constant measurement I shall be both outraged and secretly satisfied that I was right all along.

Entropy is a not instilled by a creator, but a natural consequence of math.

If the number of states labelled ordered is substantially smaller than the number of states labelled disordered and a system moves essentially randomly between states, it is far more likely that it will spend most of its time in a disordered state.

Entropy is just the universe settling into a state that cannot be meaningfully differentiated from most other states; there are far more of these than differentiable states, and so it's overwhelmingly likely that the universe ends up there.

…but why assume a system moves essentially randomly between states?

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

1. Occam's razor

2. got any other ideas? (remember, we're talking about large scale, statistical systems)

I do get that. While I understand that some people firmly believe in a literal creator, in my case it's an anthropomorphisation of all that is unknowable and truly fundamental to the existence of our universe, just as the green woman with the spiky hat is an anthropomorphisation of liberty. The difference being that I stay open to the idea that the creator might be conscious because I have no way of disproving it, where I'd put put hundred dollars down that the green lady is a big chunk of metal with a slap of copper and asbestos over the top.

I don't know if other universes with different maths are possible. Greg Egan's books take my to the limit of my conceptual capacity, but I do think there are limits to what it is possible to know from within this universe, because everything needs to be built up from axioms from this universe. I agree with your explanation, right now while I'm sitting here in this universe, but if the celestial teapot turns up this afternoon and takes us both to perpetual motion machine universe, we might start to see things differently

But life probably wouldn’t exist if entropy wasn’t increasing

Life exists because it increases the entropy in the universe

Yes, in this universe, life as we know it is a salmon of order swimming up the waterfall of entropy, every flick of it tail powered by its shit fouling the river, because life in this universe is spec'd to the constraints of this universe. But perhaps we can't find the aliens because they have tunnelled out, off to another gentler universe where they grow forever in n dimensions of time and space pondering the beauty of all the integers.

This is lovely but why would they leave their home? There are very unlikely to find another place equally comfortable to the one in which they evolved.

That's a good question Ted.

> Life exists because it increases the entropy in the universe

Life causes entropy, but do you literally mean it exists because it increases entropy? I don’t see the connection, only that life causes entropy. Can you explain?

Not a great answer but basically everything that occurs in this Universe must increase the overall entropy of the universe (second law)

Of course local entropy can decrease, hopefully in a way that is beneficial to our little corner of the universe :)

Would recommend Schrodingers “what is life” if interested further in life/entropy

> Life exists because it increases the entropy in the universe

This is an concise idea I sit on quite often.

Is this a commonly known idea? Among scientists/engineers/philosopher types? Would appreciate other thoughts.

This subject is discussed in the pop sci work of PBS spacetime https://youtu.be/GcfLZSL7YGw with reference to articles and books if you're looking for more

I think so, I've gone back to university to study biology, and I'm encountering two complimentary perspectives on what life is, a pragmatic classification version that says: ok - of the things that we see which ones are alive and which aren't and what are the distinguishing characteristics? and a second definitional version, blending Schroedinger and Shannon, that says life seems to be information propagating itself, but we're not going examine you on that in first year genomics.

Yes, we taught this during course 3 thermo @ MIT. The mystery is how the hell the universe started at such low entropy.

We can predict the final total maximum entropy of the visible universe, we are about half way there. Life produces entropy, but not as ’efficiently’ as exploding stars.

> Which means that ordered systems must create disorder in order to maintain their own order, and the place where you find the greatest order to disorder is in other actively ordered systems.

Wow, that also nicely explains how colonisation & impoverishment of some human groups is necessary in the current framework, so that high HDI can be achieved in other human groups (which then explains various historical facts).

This makes space exploration and attempts of automated resource extraction from celestial objects a noble goal, something that can achieve world peace (assuming the results are distributed).

Your comment seems to have been slapped, perhaps on the interpretation that you are justifying colonialism, or perhaps on the interpretation that you are engaging in space billionaire boosterism, but I read you comment very differently. That our islands of enlightenment rest on pillars of violence, and restumping our civilisation on a foundation of justice and sustainability isn't anti-enlightenment, it is the enlightenment project, and it's taking us hundreds of years not always moving forwards.

Yes, I’m definitely not supporting colonisation. I’m from a country who’s prospects were stunted by merciless resource extraction. I wish it didn’t happen. I’m simply saying that, it’s the “lowest common denominator” means of achieving progress and geo-local maxima by causing ethical global minima. Hence, space exploration is a noble alternative in comparison - extract your resources from dead zones in space and have a human utopia for all here on earth.

Seth's invocation of entropy is nowhere near as egregious as it is in the case of those creationists who claim that evolution would be a violation of the 2nd. law of thermodynamics, but I feel it is, ultimately, an argument that goes nowhere.

His point is that living organisms are, temporarily, islands of relative order in a universe that is generally less so, which is both a fact and consonant with the 2nd. law. As all living organisms, not just conscious ones, share this feature, it is hardly a distinguishing feature, let alone an explanation, of consciousness.

This has led some people to redefine consciousness to encompass all such systems, whether living or not - they all, supposedly, have a certain amount of of it, according to the proponents of panpsychism and its more quantitative offspring such as Integrated Information Theory (IIT).

To me (and I am a materialist in matters of the mind), this seems to be an attempt to force consciousness into the woefully inadequate explanations we currently have on hand. The sort of consciousness we are most interested in, and are most challenged by, is the sort of self-aware, language-creating, theory-of-mind holding consciousness that is most fully developed in our own species (and probably in some of our extinct predecessors), not the sort of consciousness that might be attributed to a paramecium or a thermostatically controlled building. It is not useful to lump together such a diverse range of phenomena, and we are only fooling ourselves if we claim that anodyne statements about preserving order against a chaotic universe are, in any useful sense, an explanation of consciousness.

For a much more thorough critique of IIT specifically, see Scott Aaronson:

https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1799

Humans define order. Entropy increasing is just like a falling water fall. If you zoom in on some region of chaos and say look at this pattern (like in cellular automata), you have defined that to be meaningful order. Every state in the statistical ensemble has equal likelihood of occurring, there just happen to be a small subset of interest to human minds.

This is the big problem with the idea that consciousness is just complexity, and that sufficiently complex systems might become conscious. Stars, storms, gas giant planets, nebulae, etc. The problem is these things are complex yes, but except at a very macroscopic level they have no mechanism to maintain a consistent state, or to control and reliably change that state. They're just heaving masses of particles. Computers and the brain are incredibly ordered systems, and are incredibly fragile to even the tiniest disruption of that order.

So self reproduction is not enough, and complexity is not enough. But when you put them together... you get evolution and humans.

Is that not what 'actively resist' means?