[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 It is superseded by relativistic mechanics for systems moving at large velocities near the speed of light, quantum mechanics for systems at small distance scales, and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]

Can you define order and disorder objectively? Nope, they are subjective, context dependent notions.

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.

[MonteQuest]

One word: GREED

Greed is merely a manifestation as a result of a misguided world view, not a cause. The kinds of technologies that cultures have developed have been a reflection of the energy environment they lived in and their current understanding of the forces at play. A world view explains why people organize life's activities in a certain way. When people change the way in which they do things, their world view changes to reflect and rationalize the new circumstances. Whatever world view emerges must be consistent with the energy environment it interacts with. The energy environment establishes the broad limits within which people make choices over the kind of world view they will now have. 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. With oil, we didn't have to wait for the sun to come up to have abundant energy. Post-peak, we will.

[stayathomedad]

Mr. Bean wrote, quoting Bohm:

but takes things much further towards an "order" of orders

what that means is that everything will approach zero point energy. at which point not even matter will be possible. david bohm does not talk about a paradise here, he talks about the logical consequence of the laws of nature, and they are not about building something which is perfect in someones mind as a utopia, but they talk about a slow, long fizzling out.

this is the 'order of orders': approaching zero point energy.

the ultimate order is zero point energy, nothing left.

just as you age, the universe ages my friend. come to turns with your aging, and the world will be a lot better for you and everybody around you.

the order monte talks about is a perfectly organized high energy state, which, due to the laws of nature eventually disintegrated, and we have been living of the waste it genererated ever since.

Can you define order and disorder objectively? Nope, they are subjective, context dependent notions.

there is a relativistic and a rational way of thinking. and if you read relativstic here, it does not mean as in Einstein's relativism, as that is rational. i mean relativistic, as in that is what I think order is, such a priest or a religious script would do. the difference is that rational thinking allows for an adjustment, relativistic does not. read hume's field theory, nice writing, but it does not hold water in a physical reality.

so monte may have been imprecise, that the universe turns from perfect to chaos. what he meant to say was that the universe goes from the high energy state to the low energy state, we loose energetic order. and guess what, we all live of the waste that energetic order, the prime example is the sun: what we live from is the waste which the sun generates by converting elements, that energy it wastes doing it drives all the life on earth. that is it. very simple. we live of the waste of the sun like roaches in a dirty kitchen (which brings us back to the 'a shower a day' discussion in the other forum).

live well and die with honor....

[MrBean]

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.

But isn't defining (dis)order by entropy tautological?

snip from the book I mentioned (pp 137-139):

"Such transformations between randomness and simple regular orders are intimately related to the entropy of a system. The notion of entropy is a concept of particular importance, not only in physics but in chemistry and the life sicences. Entropy is popularly described as the measure of disorder in a system. a notion that clearly carries subjective overtons. On the other hand, the science of thermodynamics enables the quantity known as entropy to be measured objectively in terms of the amount of heat and work that is associated with a system. Left to itself, a physical system tends to maximize its entorpy, a process which is therefore associated with decay, disintegrating, "running down", and increasing disorder in the system. But accordint to the metaphor that chaos is order, an increase in entropy has to be understood in a different way, that is,in terms of a kind of change of order.
Of key importance in this connection is the idea of a range of variatian in random and chaotic montion. This idea was introduced earlier in the case of the grouping of shots from a gun. A more interesting example, however, arises from a river that is in chaotic movement. Imagine an irregular and changing whirlpool that fluctuates in a very complex way, but always remains within a certain region of the river. The whirlpool may perhaps be roughly determined by neighboring rocks or features in the riverbed. As the velocity of the river increases, this variation in space may grow. But in addition, there sill also be an inward growth of subvortices of ever finer nature. Therefore, a measure of the overall range of variation of the whirlpool should include both of these factors - the inward and the outward growth.
As a matter of fact, in classical mechanics, a natural measure of this kind has already been worked out. Its technical name is phase space and its measure is determined by multiplying the range of variation of position and the range of variation in momentum. The former, the range of variation in position, corresponds roughly to the changes in location of the vortex as it spreads out into the river and the surrounding water becomes more agitated. The latter, the range of variation of momentum, corresponds to the extent to which the whirlpool is excited internally so that it breaks into finer and finer vortices.
Clearly the measure in phase space corresponds quite well to an intuitive notion of the overall degree of order involved in the flow. For the more the general location of the vortex expands, the higher is the degree of order; and the more the internal vortices subdivide, the gigher also is the degree of order. What is particularly interesting about this measure in phase space is that it corresponds to what is actually used in physics to define entropy.
Entropy is a concept which is of vital importance in many areas of science, yet which lacks a clear physical interpretation. For example, there has been much debata on the extent to which the concept of entropy is subjective or objective. However, with the present approach to the notion of order, chaos and randomness, it is now possible to clarify what is meant by entropy.
Consider an isolated system of interacting particles. Each particle acts as a contingency for all the others, in such a way that the overall motion tends to be chaotic. When such a system is left to itself, it moves toward what is called thermal equilibrium, a condition in which tere is no net flow of heat or energy within the system and regular suborders vanish almost entirely. In this state of equilibrium, the entropy of the system is at its maximum. This maximum entropy is therefore associated with the inability of the system to carry out work, transfer usefull energy from one region to the other, or in any other way generate global orders of activity.
In statistical mechanics the numerical value of this entropy is calculated from the range of random montion in phase space. (To be more exact, it is the logarithm of this measure.) This means that when energy is added to the system, the range of random motion will grow and the corresponding entropy will increase.
A change in entropy is therefor a measure of the change in the range of fluctuations that occur within the random order. Entropy now has a clear meaning that is independent of subjective knowledge or judgement about the details of the fluctuation. This approach to entropy does not require any discussion of disorder, which in any case cannot be defined in a clear way. Treating entropy in this fashion avoids many of the difficulties normally associated with this topic, such as the subjective notion of what could be meant by disorder. After all, since entropy is an objective property of a system which can actually be observed with the aid of thermodynamic processes, why then should subjective and ultimately undefinable feelings about disorder affect the objective behavior of such a system?"

This gives only small glimpse of Bohm's notion of order, I hope you read the whole book.

[MrBean]

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.

I fully agree. Bohm has continued and set in motion many of those cycles and flows that will lead to paradigm shift.

[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.

But isn't defining (dis)order by entropy tautological?

The broad imperative set down by second law applies to a room in chaos as well as gas in a beaker in an isolated system. Few understand this. It must be part of the new paradigm. I am going to start a new forum on Conservation soon. We will have plenty of opportunity to explore this concept.

[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]

You 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.

Bohm quote:

We have become a scientific society. This society has produced all sorts of discoveries and technology, but if it leads to destruction, either through war or through devastation of natural resources, then it will have been the least successful society that ever existed. We are now in danger of that.

Where we are going depends on the programs of four thousand five hundred million people, all somewhat different, most of them opposed to one another. Every moment these programs are changing in detail. Who can say where they are going to lead us? All we can do is start a movement among those few people who are interested in changing the meaning.

I've read some of Bohm's work, and although he hasn't as yet been able to produce a test for his implicate order theory, it is intriguing. However, the order he is talking about seems to be about structure rather than how energy reacts to a transformation with regard to second law. I see it as having bearing on social structure but not on how we deal with the limits of second law.

[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]

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.

You are getting into the heart of the question. Quantum theory, the perception of wave-particle dualism, puts in question our traditional view of what constitutes a 'physical process'. So far most of science has consentrated on the particle aspect of 'what is' ("hammer and nails"), and the view has largely been that a 'physical process' is necessarily materialistic. The wave aspect has been problematic and enigmatic, and scientist have tended to sticking to mathematical formulations and avoid even attempting to talk about it in physical terms - with few exceptions, most notably Bohm. Bohm's notions of active information and scales of order are central to the question of nature of organisms. Active information (e.g. quantum potential or pilot wave in Bohm's causal interpretation of QM) is not a force, even though it acts upon matter, and it is not information in the Einsteinian sense (signal), it is form that in-forms.

There is growing support for the hypothesis that living organisms can somehow push or circumvent the classical barrier between quantum and Newtonian domains, that living organisms are outgrowth of both classical materialistic physical processes and quantum or quantum-like physical processes, that are not limited to the material aspect of "what is". So there is good possibility that the divisive argument between "material monists" and "theists" can finally be put to rest as both may be wrong, matter is not all of 'what is', but that something else aspect of 'what is' is of course not anything supernatural, just something that we still understand poorly.

[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]

One word/name
Rockefeller.

You are missing the point. Rockefeller's greed was based upon the mechanical world view, not some other view of how the world works.

kebab quote:

two words:
greed and ignorance

Same with you, Kebab. You miss the point, although ignorance of the imperative of second law makes this climate possible.

[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€