[MonteQuest]

The universe started with complete order and has been moving toward a more and more disordered state ever since. I find it quite odd that we are willing to see the history of the universe as beginning with a perfect state and moving towards decay and chaos and yet continue to cling to the notion that the history of the earth follows the exact opposite course, i.e., that it is moving from a state of chaos to a progressively more ordered world. How soon we forget that the philosophers of antiquity viewed history in a way that is exactly opposite to how we perceive it. For the Greeks, history was a process of continual degradation. Horace, a Roman, mused that "time depreciates the value of the world." Horace didn't know about the second law of thermodynamics, but in this verse he summed up the very essence of the Entropy Law. In Greek mythology, history is represented by a series of five stages, each more degraded and more harsh than the one preceding it. Plato and Aristotle believed that the best social order was one with the least amount of change and growth. Growth did not signal greater value and order, but less. The ideal state was the state that slowed down the growth process of decay as much as possible. Their goal was to hand down to the next generation a world as much preserved from change as possible.

The Christian view of history, which dominated western Europe throughout the middle ages, perceived life in this world as a mere stopover in preparation for the next. They saw history as an ongoing struggle with evil's attempt to sow chaos in a world headed for perfection. The doctrine of original sin precluded the possibility of humanity ever improving its lot in life. To the medieval mind, God controlled every single event. God made history, not people. The human purpose was not to "achieve things" but to seek salvation.

By the middle of the eighteenth century, all the key elements for another paradigm shift in world view were unified. Our current world view is based upon classical, or "Newtonian mechanics" after Sir Isaac Newton and his laws of motion. This is a model of the physics of forces acting upon bodies. Classical mechanics is subdivided into statics (which models objects at rest), kinematics (which models objects in motion), and dynamics (which models subjected to forces). Classical mechanics produces very accurate results within the domain of everyday experience. It is superseded by relativistic mechanics for systems moving at large velocities near the speed of light, quantum mechanics for systems at small distance scales, and relativistic quantum field theory for systems with both properties.

Big thinkers of the time, like Rene Descartes, concluded that the world was one of mathematical precision, not confusion. The Greek view of history was deemed mathematically impossible and therefore false. The Christian world view fared little better. Newton used Descartes mathematics to describe mechanical motion. It was a world view made for machines, not people. It was a short journey from the cold, inert universe made up of pure dead matter in motion to the world of pure materialism. The answer, it was assumed, was to use the principles of mechanics to rearrange the stuff of nature in a way that best advanced the material self-interest of human beings: The more material well-being we amass, the more ordered the world must be getting. Progress, then, is the amassing or ever greater amounts of material abundance which leads to a more ordered world. Science and technology are the tools to get the job done. Reduced to its simplest abstraction, progress is seen as the process by which the "less ordered" natural world is harnessed by people to create a more ordered material environment. Second Law tells us that just the opposite is the case.

Though we are largely unaware of it, much of the way we think, act, and feel can be traced back to the fragments woven together into the historical paradigms of our not too distant past. I find it quite ironic indeed that only now as the fabric is starting to fray and unravel is it possible to really see the stuff we and our modern world are made of. The mechanical world view is losing ground every day as the energy base upon which it was nourished declines. If there is a history to look back on post-peak, future generations will shake their heads in disbelief at the 300 years we call the machine or modern age, for they will be living under an entirely new world paradigm. They will call our Machine Age, the Age of Illusion.

[MrBean]

[quote="MonteQuest"]The universe started with complete order and has been moving toward a more and more disordered state ever since. I find it quite odd that we are willing to see the history of the universe as beginning with a perfect state and moving towards decay and chaos and yet continue to cling to the notion that the history of the earth follows the exact opposite course, i.e., that it is moving from a state of chaos to a progressively more ordered world. How soon we forget that the philosophers of antiquity viewed history in a way that is exactly opposite to how we perceive it. For the Greeks, history was a process of continual degradation. Horace, a Roman, mused that “time depreciates the value of the world.â€

[skateari]

One word: GREED

[MonteQuest]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('MrBean', ' ')
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'C')an you define order and disorder objectively? Nope, they are subjective, context dependent notions.

[MonteQuest]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('skateari', 'O')ne word: GREED

[stayathomedad]

Mr. Bean wrote, quoting Bohm:

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'b')ut takes things much further towards an "order" of orders

[MrBean]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('MonteQuest', '
')The only definition there is to consider is the one defined by the second law of thermodynamics. This is the new world view we must embrace.

[MrBean]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('MonteQuest', '
')We will be moving from a world of quantities and stocks to one of cycles and flows. The current world view must and will shift just as radically.

[MonteQuest]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('MrBean', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('MonteQuest', '
')The only definition there is to consider is the one defined by the second law of thermodynamics. This is the new world view we must embrace.

[pepper2000]

I tend to view history more in terms of ideas and attitudes rather than things like energy. I don't believe we can realistically say, "If only we had unlimited energy, then everything would be great."

Many people feel that something has started to go wrong in the world in recent years, and particularly in America. While things have never been perfect and probably never will be, I think we are in an age of a particularly great sense of dislocation and this will be the fundamental cause of problems in our near future.

I think the fundamental problem in the human condition, from Adam and Eve up to the present day, is that we just can't seem to be happy with our lives. It's just a bit worse than usual in the US today. Watch prime time network television for a night if you dare and see how the advertisements exploit our collective sense of insecurity and unhappiness. See how many people think they have the world of ours all figured out and how many more want to talk or fight rather than listen.

Fortunately our stay on this earth is very brief, so there's no real need to get hot and bothered about it all.

[MonteQuest]

[quote="MrBean]$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'Y')ou really should read what David Bohm says about various orders (deterministic, indeterministic, chaotic, generative, implicate etc) and how they interact dynamically. I recommend 'Science, Order and Creativity' by Bohm and Peat, it contains among other things look at the historical development of our notions of order, along the same lines as in your post, but takes things much further towards an "order" of orders.

[MrGresham]

Social entropy; my thoughts rooted in Anthropology.

I don't know if the mechanical and technological eras (our tool-making ability at work) have given us more than a brief extension of what was going on already. Control of the physical environment has given Man a greater impact on the environment around him, certainly. But, limits are inevitably reached.

(As a side note on religious psychology, in ancient hunter-gatherer or rural times, nearly everything Man saw was made by Nature, which he could term an expression of God. Attitude: Reverence, respect.

(In settled, urban times, more and more that he saw around him was made by fellow men, gradually replacing Nature and God as the prime movers. Attitude: Species narcissism, collective hubris, arrogance.

(From here, the next stop is the mania of Ego, where the individual has replaced Nature and God with his own mental creations and abstractions. This can rarely be healthy Attitudinal outcome: Insanity, both individual and collective.)

(Can you tell why I'm a Rural Chauvinist?)

The mention of "Greed" sparked recall of my particular (economistic?) view of our "progress" or development as a social species.

As hunter-gatherers (one million years?), everyone had to fulfill the survival function, and each was held to a strict standard of utility. If you could make spearheads better than you could hunt, you might have a job outside the hunting band, but I'll bet those were rare. "Leaders" did not get away with much, and their performance metrics were simple and severe.

As agricultural settled farmers (10,000 years) productivity allowed other classes of employment to infiltrate the labor force and assist/prey upon the wants, needs, and delusions of humankind. A priest class, politicians, kings and soldiers, etc etc.

The better you were at selling yourself as a necessary component of society, well, the less weeding and hoeing you had to do.

Believe in God or gods? Enough to convince others that you did and they should, with all donations channeled through your clever hands. Oh yeah, and all those temple girls, well.. "what goes in the Temple, stays in the Temple."

In today's financial world (100-300 years), we see the farthest extension of this centralization of wealth and power yet seen on Earth. Its brevity as yet begs for correction, as in Bull to Bear market slide.

Entropy enters as the human pyramid, inverted upon the shoulders of the 3% of workers who actually feed us, develops a class of Takers and Climbers who learn and train and work to climb as high upon the lucrative illusions of their fellows as they may. The LESS they know of actual useful physical tasks, the MORE they are rewarded -- for now. (Think Musical Chairs here.)

But it is still an inverted pyramid... 'nuff said?

[gg3]

Interesting about the ancient Greeks: growth = decay, and change = decay. How did that square with the accumulation of knowledge over time in their own society, or their own development of whatever useful inventions they had? Or were those attributed to the gods?

Christian civilization switched from medieval to renaissance at about the same time as it discovered coffee through its contact with Muslim civilization. Never underestimate the impact of psychobiology:-).

Entropy is a "complex equivalent," with three denotative meanings and a multitude of connotative ones. The physics definition has been pretty well covered here. In information theory (Shannon), entropy is defined as the measure of the loss of information in a communications channel. So far these are not too far apart, i.e. each refers to the loss over time of the ability to accomplish work in some sense.

But then comes biology. Living matter is inherently syntropic, in the sense that it tends, through evolution, toward greater degrees of order and complexity over time. Living matter can be defined as a "dissipative structure" (Prigogene), which increases its local complexity by feeding off of a surrounding entropy-flow, e.g. life on earth evolving through the use of energy gained from the sun's entropy. To the extent that the inherent nature of organisms is (as far as possible) to survive, reproduce, and accumulate information over time (genetically via evolution, and in intelligent species, memetically via externally stored knowledge), their inherent syntropic characteristics place them at odds with the entropic nature of nonliving matter and energy.

This in turn is the root of the "subjective" connotations of entropy and physical disorder as being somehow negative. That is, this particular "subjectivity" is an objective inherent characteristic of all organisms, as demonstrated through their individual and collective behavior over time spans measured from that of one individual of a species, to the overall evolution of species-in-general.

Much hinges on one's view of the place of living organisms in the universe at-large. Various flavors of materialist monism and atheism attempt to argue that life is an epiphenomenon of an otherwise lifeless universe; this, largely in reaction against theists' claims that life is of directly divine origin. Yet the fact remains that all of the matter, energy, and interactions among them that we observe in this universe, are both necessary and inevitable; and one can't make an exception for living organisms. That is, organisms are a necessary outgrowth of other physical processes, and as such, despite being an infinitesimal minority of the universe in terms of mass, they are not irrelevant.

Consistent with that, our central task as living organisms is to utilize the available entropy-flows from our local star, to create syntropy in our own environment to the extent possible.

[gg3]

Re. greed as manifestation of misguided worldview: Greed can be reduced to the operation of the ape-instincts for consumption and increase, in the absence of limiting feedback loops.

Greed was certainly present in the ancient Greeks. It was demonstrably present in any societies that had accumulations of wealth in few hands, which is to say, most of them through history. North American Indians of the Pacific Northwest practiced slavery, as did African societies prior to European contact. Reverent hunter-gatherers are as capable as colonialists with European technology, when it comes to enslaving other humans; the explanation changes but the motivation remains. In almost every culture, the accumulation of material goods has been used as a tool for obtaining, wielding, and/or demonstrating power over others.

So it's not quite correct to say that we would do better to revert to the ancient Greek worldview of entropy as dominant paradigm, or to a state of pre-scientific reverence; either of those alone won't take greed out of the human emotional lexicon; a more fundamental change is needed. Humans need to evolve; the only way out is up.

[MrBean]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('gg3', '
')Much hinges on one's view of the place of living organisms in the universe at-large. Various flavors of materialist monism and atheism attempt to argue that life is an epiphenomenon of an otherwise lifeless universe; this, largely in reaction against theists' claims that life is of directly divine origin. Yet the fact remains that all of the matter, energy, and interactions among them that we observe in this universe, are both necessary and inevitable; and one can't make an exception for living organisms. That is, organisms are a necessary outgrowth of other physical processes, and as such, despite being an infinitesimal minority of the universe in terms of mass, they are not irrelevant.

[bentstrider]

One word/name
Rockefeller.
This creep and his "Standard Oil" company are one or one of the few things that started the insatiable thirst for petroleum in the first place.
The world was doing just fine to some extent before petroleum.
We had hemp products. We of course had coal(yeah, I know, fossil fuel) and there were also street lamps burning whale oil.
But when Henry Ford came along, he originally wanted and designed his vehicles to burn sugarbeet ethanol. And Rudolph Diesel powered his first successful engine off of nuts.
Yet, Rockefeller came and blew smoke up everyones ass, and now here we are facing the ills of his teachings, a hundred years later.
The way I see it, there is a sun shining on the horizon.
We just have to use what feasible petroleum there is to kindle these long dormant fuel ideas.

[khebab]

two words:
greed and ignorance
greedy people use ignorance to abuse of the system and make more money. Greed promote short term views against long term ones. Lately, greed was disguised under the term of globalisation and other ecomomic imperatives. The question is how to control greed of money and power and promote reflexion over long term issues?

Khebab

[MonteQuest]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('bentstrider', 'O')ne word/name
Rockefeller.

[MonteQuest]

[quote]Reduced to its simplest abstraction, progress is seen as the process by which the “less orderedâ€

[MrBean]

[quote="MonteQuest"][quote]Reduced to its simplest abstraction, progress is seen as the process by which the “less orderedâ€