Skip to main content

analogy between law of action/reaction and entropy

One can (fecetiously?) take the law of action/reaction as indicating that there is "nothing new under the sun": when I push a bike (with a kid on it) the sum of force that I and the bike exert on each other are equal. And so it is with the mechanical forces within my body as I move while floating in space. There is no such thing as an individual efficient cause, no starting point of motion. Merely the transfer of movements already there.

But to interpret movement in this way would be to take a mathematical abstraction as the complete story. Something was left out at the beginning, something given in the common sense regard for the situation. And in this case, common sense is no mere "folk physics" to be overturned.

On the other hand, if common sense is correct, then the way in which there is more to this situation than is recognized by Newtonian consideration of the forces, and this "more" does not contradict the abstraction.... just as the "more" (common sense) and the "less" (Newtonian analysis of the sum of forces) are both correct and non-contradictory (for one who doesn't absolutize an abstraction)..... this coexistence of truths about nature is a kind of model for how a materialistic analysis of nature can be true as far as it goes as long a it has an openendedness to the aspects of reality that don't fall under its abstractions.

It certainly is the case that entropy increases in each (closed) system. Yet order is quite impressive in a small part of a system called an organism. No contradiction here either.

Maybe there are other ways in which this analogy applies...

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

response to friend who suggested that the self is a democracy of neural parts

This is a nice way to try to avoid being cornered re the irreality of the self if you're a reductionist, for you can assert that a pattern obtains at the microscopic level that is not all that unlike the pattern found at the societal level.  No need for the one self that does it all: instead, you have many sub-selfs that compete for dominance or take turns guiding the whole. The problem with this is, however, that the voters/officials are all zombies.  None of them thinks about the whole as such.  And perhaps none of them thinks even about themselves (unless one is a panzoist).  None of them makes a comparison of alternatives. The more this proposed democracy seems like a zombocracy, the more consciousness will be seem to be epiphenomenal. Furthermore, if the oneness of the self is less real than the multiplicity of explanatory neural parts, then why can't each of these neural parts be conceived of as democracy as well?  And why not parts of these parts, et...

what is an organism?

How about defining it as an instance of functional complexity? And treating the list of properties as following necessarily from this definition? Okay, this is very diamond-in-the-rough (or perhaps zirconium...) but here goes my thoughts on the matter: (Complexity) Many diverse parts (functional) acting for the sake of the whole I think I need to add something like "not as the instrument of another" or something like that. Given that they act together as one whole and given entropy, etc., the organism will need to posses more order than its surroundings (homeostasis). It will therefore need to take in energy (nutrition), which it will use to sustain its readiness to interact with its environment so as to preserve its own being (homeostasis again?), but which will eventually break down (death), so that in order for that life form to continue it will need to duplicate itself (reproduction), which, upon occurring, will involve both development (growth) to maturity and...