Thanks to a tweet from @pezeshkicharles (also https://empathy.guru/) for reminding me of this piece, via posting the ‘Big Think’ article at https://bigthink.com/ideafeed/mit-physicist-proposes-new-meaning-of-life (I don’t recommend you click on this, loads of adware etc and a promised video which I can’t get).
Source: A New Thermodynamics Theory of the Origin of Life | Quanta Magazine
This is well worth a read – I don’t claim to have any real scientific understanding, but what I said in response to the tweet was:
“This is really intriguing to me – reminds me of this narrative of developing complexity – stream.syscoi.com/2019/11/06/ada and the message which didn’t quite get into this systems change write-up – forumforthefuture.org/Handlers/Downl – that the purpose of ‘systems change’ is ultimately to support the development of the universe’s unfolding complexity.
“This is (a) Alan Watts’ ‘ah yes, the rock in space is peopling’ (like a tree ‘fruits’), and (b) I *think* it’s the piece I’ve been trying to re-find for some time which essentially makes the point that negentropy / complexity is actually a mechanism of longer-term entropy.
“(And we must remember that the unfolding complexity is essentially ‘hierarchical’ as well as networked in nature)”
While the statement ‘everything that develops in nature is necessarily in the nature of nature’ might seem a truism of the ‘Eureka! You’ve discovered water’ type, it’s the kind of thing I get excited about.
Source: A New Thermodynamics Theory of the Origin of Life | Quanta Magazine
Content I took from the BigThink piece when I originally posted this at https://model.report/s/4eliay/mit_physicist_proposes_new_meaning_of_life_big_think
MIT Physicist Proposes New “Meaning of Life”
MIT physicist Jeremy England claims that life may not be so mysterious after all, despite the fact it is apparently derived from non-living matter. In a new paper, England explains how simple physical laws make complex life more likely than not. In other words, it would be more surprising to find no life in the universe than a buzzing place like planet Earth.
What does all matter—rocks, plants, animals, and humans—have in common? We all absorb and dissipate energy. While a rock absorbs a small amount of energy before releasing what it doesn’t use back into the universe, life takes in more energy and releases less. This makes life better at redistributing energy, and the process of converting and dissipating energy is simply a fundamental characteristic of the universe.
[S]imple physical laws make complex life more likely than not.
According to England, the second law of thermodynamics gives life its meaning. The law states that entropy, i.e. decay, will continuously increase. Imagine a hot cup of coffee sitting at room temperature. Eventually, the cup of coffee will reach room temperature and stay there: its energy will have dissipated. Now imagine molecules swimming in a warm primordial ocean. England claims that matter will slowly but inevitably reorganize itself into forms that better dissipate the warm oceanic energy.
[T]he second law of thermodynamics gives life its meaning.
The strength of England’s theory is that it provides an underlying physical basis for Darwin’s theory of evolution and helps explain some evolutionary tendencies that evolution cannot. Adaptations that don’t clearly benefit a species in terms of survivability can be explained thusly: “the reason that an organism shows characteristic X rather than Y may not be because X is more fit than Y, but because physical constraints make it easier for X to evolve than for Y to evolve.”
Systems Community of Inquiry 