work, order and available energy
today’s tunes feature uilleann pipes, the singing octopus
in my previous post i talked about the empiric macroscopic fact of the second law of thermodynamics.
just to clear things up, i call facts what is established by the scientific method as a valid theory, therefore facts can be improved on and change but tend to stabilize. i consider facts independent of the observer and don’t want to dive into quantum nonsense, i’m dealing with the macroscopic world and macroscopic laws. i consider many of the current explanations for quantum effects very unfortunate in a practical science point of view, and it has opened the door for all kinds of quackery. but i don’t want to go down that rabbit hole right now. poor quantum has a bad name. it should be called quantified, so people would stop being silly and using it for spiritual mumbo jumbo just because it sounds so cool.
one of the great mysteries of our universe is that it began with very low entropy, or a lot of available energy (in the thermodynamic sense), and with an arrow of time. most laws of physics work well forwards and backwards in time. but thermodynamics only moves forward, like a broken train downhill. but the available energy we have allows us to locally express negative entropy, via useful work.
what is work? work is energy spent to move things. energy, as i said, is part of the mysteries of nature, our universe just happens to have a lot of it and very ordered (low entropy). so work uses this energy, sometimes to create entropy, and sometimes to create ectropy (inverse entropy). remember the second law? the balance is always positive in entropy.
note that it is currently postulated that the universe has zero total energy, but that is not relevant for earthlings. we live in a little rock with a lot of free energy, and i’m not planning on going to live in the empty cold voids of space. so i’m not interested in that side either.
let’s do a little example of this, to see how powerful this model is. let’s say you are an agent (something that can do work on things using energy). you take a pile of things (let’s call them rocks) and after a lot of work hours (many little instant works added up in sequence), you pile them up into a cathedral. your work has generated ectropy in the rocks system (the pile of rocks is now ordered, or has information), it went from disordered to ordered. but to work you had to eat some sandwiches, piss, shit, live your everyday life, and to do that, you produced entropy by consuming free energy (like the calories in your sandwich or in your reserve cells). so, if you do your net universal balance, entropy increased. but if you do a boundary around the rocks and forget everything about the rest (silly, but that’s how we do things down here), you’d say your pile of rocks just became more organized (less entropy). so this kind of work you did is called useful work, because it resulted in ectropy. the work you did to eat the sandwich, not so much, because it consumed free energy, or generated entropy. you now successfully synthesized information (the cathedral).
the main reason why we can have ectropy on earth (and lots of it), is because the sun is our big fat sandwich. we get so many calories from the sun that we can gorge on it and do crazy stuff like living things and flying things and shiny things and what not. so despite the human illusion that we build things, we’re in fact just piggy-backing sun’s calories (or Watt hours). so we can think of the earth as a kind of morbidly obese planet. it is getting so fat on calories it has all this life all over it, making itself pretty.
what happened on earth? why isn’t mercury, which gets many more calories, even fatter? well, in a sense, it is. the problem is that for the thermodynamic conditions for order to emerge, you need agents to do the work, not just sandwiches (or Joules, a sandwich has about 350 Calories or 1464 Joules or 0.4 Watt hours). the first agents are the physical laws, but they don’t tend to transform much. then there are chemical elements, and they only become more ordered in very specific physical conditions (when the laws are right, like gravity). water, for example, is only liquid at a specific range of physical conditions. like water, other, more complex molecules, only emerge if the setting is “just right”. for planets, people like to call this the “goldilocks zone”, though i still wonder who are the three bears. maybe the laws of thermodynamics, raining on goldilocks parade? so for the agents to emerge, you need some kind of setting, like when the weather is great to go to the beach and you think wow, i could really be at the beach right now. you are a thing being affected by your agent (the weather) and turning into something else (a thing at the beach). you’ve been manipulated by the sun! how terrible!
note that this is a recursive definition (with somewhat fractal properties). if the laws are agents that create new agents, and those agents create new agents and so on, we have the setting for evolution! obviously, agents die too, when the sun goes down, the beach gets cold and you leave. remember the setting? it’s not that good anymore. so you pick up your stuff and leave. but there’s always that dude that stays longer because he can put up with the cold or took some blankets and wine. look at him as a more evolved beach goer. evolution is just something that happens when you combine agents making agents and agents killing agents but not all of them. so the ones that survive, are fitter. like the delicious chocolate molecule. it’s so delicious you’re bound to eat it and shit it and make new cocoa plants. you’re being manipulated by the cocoa plant! how terrible!
so if laws are agents, what made the laws? big question. i leave that to whoever wants to dabble in those questions. it can be the flying spaguetti monster, or a mad man’s dream, or whatever. we can only test as far as the laws are testable. if it’s not testable, i don’t care. again, i’m an earthling and i’m not considering becoming a god or meeting one or starting my own universe. i think physicists are better at doing that. when i have my feet in the sand, i like to enjoy it. i don’t need to know that the sand is made of jiggly things made of jiggly things made of jiggly things. some people do, and that’s great, but not what i’m discussing at all. for what it’s worth, things jiggle too much already (or why i don’t do nudism that much at the beach).
see reality a bit like an onion. the more you peel it and dig deeper, the more it stinks. and eventually, if you dig deeper, you end up crying and with your hands empty. i kind of think physics is going the way of the onion a bit. so i don’t like crying so much (unless it’s from happiness), so i’m not looking to peel the onion too much.
the problem is that these layers are all mixed up, like a mutant onion. you kick this bottle on the floor one day, it hits a car, makes a dent, the car was the guy’s boss’s, he gets fired, ends up dying because he slipped on the way out of his office and hit his head against the porcelain cat. think of all the agents at work. gravity, friction, but also pavements that required city planning by the state, buildings that required engineers and rich people and architects and a lot of bricks, porcelain cats that required bad taste to exist, the dude himself that didn’t mind taking the boss’s car to get him his suit from the cleaners, the list is huge!
it’s hard to accept that these layers are all entwined and mixed between themselves. that agents from some layers are affected (and affect) agents from other layers. so everyone just chooses one layer (i’m a physicist, i’m a philosopher, i’m a biologist, i’m a priest, i’m a fashionista hipster, etc etc), mostly because it’s too hard to see everything at once with our little primate brains.
then comes the simplification, saying everything is made by agent a or agent b. well, it’s all of them, having a big nonsense party at our expense. it’s like everyone is just looking for a way to feel their “layer” (or trade, or art, or science) is the core of every other. guess what, it isn’t, but since you know so much about it, it’s obvious you’ll see it everywhere. the more a trade deals with complexity (or how these layers of agents intertwine), the more sensitive it will be to hidden variables, or, let’s say, secret agents. like that time you thought the lamp moved on its own and it was a ghost and you were so scared, but in the end it was just a fan behind the couch. the fan! a secret agent! you were manipulated by the fan! how terrible!
each agent has its own rules to be understood. physical laws are probably the easiest, since they fit in tiny pieces of paper and t-shirts (isn’t that why we draw them so pretty? so we can tattoo them and use them in t-shirts?). but some agents are very hard to deal with. special agent DNA for example, or special agent yours truly. and it might be true that if you throw me out of a bridge i will fall (agent gravity can grab me), it might be also true that i might jump for love (agent love can grab me too). it’s not hard to see that agent yours truly is subject to agents of many layers. and since our tiny brains can only deal with a couple of things at once, we just specialize. that’s fine and wonderful. just don’t tell me love is physics. it’s love, and though you can still throw a love letter in the river, you won’t take its story with you. love might be made of smaller things, but it’s not just those things. it has a specific arrangement, order to it. and to try to quantify it (in bits maybe, or money spent on flowers and dinners), you must live it.
work is what makes agents interact with each other, thanks to the big free energy sandwiches. and patterns in work tell you their rules. for example, gravity is an angry man always pulling people “down”. that’s his job. but he’s also the one that makes planets go round. so maybe he’s not that bad after all, maybe just grumpy from having to pull everyone “down”. hey, we all have to do work we don’t enjoy, right?
so complex agents can be created by simple agents, like a human budding from a single cell. all it takes is free energy and some kind of agent (or agents) working. evolution is a rule that works with most of these agents, and it’s so powerful it led to some agents being able to understand other agents and their rules. that’s us! but that’s also dogs and cats catching flies (hey, they know where the fly is going, they wouldn’t otherwise catch it), sunflowers turning towards the sun (what? they have no brains! maybe they are more like zombies!). ok, sunflowers don’t turn, they “grow towards”. but as an agent understanding the rules of another agent (sun) they do a pretty good job.
what rules matter? what order matters? well. i don’t really know. i have my opinions. i’ll post them later. for now, here’s a bird singing through a pipe octopus. it takes a whole lot of sandwiches to wrestle this one.