Hi James,

This is Ted Christopher and I am getting back about your essay and also comment.

You cover a lot of interesting ground in your essay. The work of England I had never heard of.

I just read an article that might be of interest to you. The January Scientific American has an article ""Tangled Up in Spacetime" about the growing interest in 'It from Qubit". This is drawing a lot of attention from physicists.

I think that the DNA connection to mental specifics will be a surprising setback for science. The differences between twins (even conjoined ones) and some unusual behavioral phenomena suggest that there is more to it.

I hope your work goes well.

Ted Christopher

Hi,

Several people have discussed Jeremy England's ideas. I think your explanation is the best. I wonder if his work can be proven theoretically or does it necessarily need experiments. If it is true, it is fascinating.

Thank you.

Noson

James,

Excellent essay deserving the high rating I gave it.

Peter

Hi Jim,

I appreciate you mentioned "life's higher meaning". Don't you think that the biggest discoveries and inventions of humanity happened in following this meaning, not the goals of survival and comfort? If so, would it be correct to try to explain the core of human beings by means of entropy and survival? In our essay we are trying to show that this approach leads to the Epimenides paradox. One more question relates to the "unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics": how it can be accounted in the framework of your paper?

Cheers,

Alexey Burov.

Hello James,

This is a really lucidly written and interesting essay - thank you for an enjoyable read focussing on a wide variety of phenomena in the natural sciences. I definitely agree that the second law of thermodynamics is likely intimately connected with life. You refer to England's work, which is one we encountered but did not develop in detail in our essay with my coauthor. Instead we focussed on another interesting examination of maximising entropy production based on Kleidon's work and how a holistic thermodynamic view can help us understand how life emerged on Earth.

It is interesting that you allude to our marching towards a unifying theory of everything and understanding natural phenomena in an ordered way as a a goal-oriented behaviour. I find it very interesting how such awareness of physical laws even arose in humans out of evolutionary or entropy maximisation principles. As a particle physicist by day, it is striking how we as living systems emerging from likely thermodynamic principles, came to describe the microcosm at such exquisite levels of empirical precision. As you mention the arrow of time, it is intriguingly even somewhat present at colliders as muons always fly away from the collision point never towards it.

Thanks again for an interesting read!

Best,

Jesse

Hi James

I very much enjoyed your essay. Much food for thought here, and well expressed. I like your focus on the big picture issues.

To throw a couple of extra ideas into the mix that may be of interest, I tend to subscribe to the entropy as energy dispersal interpretation. There is a wikipedia site on this and you may also find useful information here.

Regarding dark matter, my favourite theory is primordial black holes. Perhaps they would suck up a lot of plasma energy in a hot dense universe, if there were enough of them. You can read more about this here.

Best wishes

Gavin

    Not sure why the first link isn't working - search "entropysite Lambert" and it comes up first

    Gavin

    Dear Jim,

    Thank you for taking the time to read through and comment on my essay, I appreciate the comments you have made. I have in the meantime read your essay and particularly enjoyed that you tied in some of Robert Frost's work. (I had the pleasure of visiting his house in Vermont in 2013, and also quote him in my PhD thesis.) You mention "at the heart of England's idea is the second law of thermodynamics: hot things cool down, gas diffuses through the air". This was what I was taught in physics classes, but I have since come to appreciate the implications of these observations only more recently. The rigid hold of the Second Law on energy and entropy accounting makes it a big restriction than it at first appears. And restrictions are one of the signatures of intentions (choosing a narrow physical evolution in an otherwise larger pool of options). Thanks to your perspectives here, it is something I would like to think about more.

    Thank you again and I have rated your essay too.

    Regards,

    Robert

    Dear James,

    Many thanks for the kind words about my essay .

    With great interest I read your essay, which of course is worthy of the highest rating.

    I like your thoughts

    «It only seems fitting that with a curious zeal, we should seek the origin of the universe and the dynamics that orchestrated two of the greatest mathematical rules: the first and second law of thermodynamics, the first involving the store of energy and the second its dissipation, which the universe seems to be mindlessly moving toward»

    When there is time, I will certainly analyze the interesting work that you offer

    «They are - in principle -- the conditions described by Philip Marcus of the University of California, Berkeley. In "Physical Review Letters" in 2013, he described "vortices in turbulent fluids " that spontaneously replicated themselves by drawing energy from shear in the surrounding fluid.»

    «Also in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Michael Breener, a professor of applied mathematics and physics at Harvard, with his collaborators, presented theoretical models and simulations of microstructures that self-replicate. By "optimizing interaction energies to destabilize kinetic traps" and in a finite heat trap, clusters of specially coated particles dissipate energy by roping nearby spheres into forming identical clusters.»

    Kind regards,

    Vladimir

    James,

    I can to some extent agree to your point of view in your interesting essay, and I wrote an article before that might be of interest to you.

    http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/2313

    Good luck with your essay

    Kind regards

    Koorosh

    Dear Sir,

    (On his essay) You are right that "our pursuit of goals depends on the contextual occasions of life". How do we fix a goal? We feel the deficiency of something which creates a need in our mind. If we have the knowledge of the mechanism to fulfill the need, we fix that as goal and direct the necessary agencies in our body to execute the task. For this reason, there is a brief time lag between the feeling of the need and its execution, which is called the Readiness Potential (RP). Thus, the goal is related to fulfilling the need - hence beyond survival. It extends to food, shelter, survival and procreation in all life forms, who only respond to the given situation based on past memory.

    Though some animals and birds appear to plan for the future, it is related to these four areas based on memory of experience or observation and as a response to impending signals. Only human beings truly plan for the future. Dr. Jeremy England is correct in extending these instincts to inanimate objects, because if we precisely define life (separate from consciousness), it behaves mechanically. Once our first heart beat starts, it continues perpetually mechanically. When it stops, our body disintegrates. Our senses appear with the body and disappear with death. Thus, laws of increasing entropy drive matter to acquire life-like physical properties. But this is not consciousness, because it is mechanical.

    You are right that "living organisms seek order, but as we age we lose order". The reason is related to the nature of time evolution, as separate from Darwinian evolution. Time evolution is applicable to everything that exists in the same manner. It has six stages: 1) from being as cause to 2) becoming as effect. 3) Growth due to accumulation of similars, 4) Transformation due to harmonious accumulation, 5) Transmutation due to non-harmonious accumulation and finally, 6) Change of form or destruction by disintegration. You are talking about the fourth and the fifth stages. This is the "basic natural order, according to England, that is dissipation-driven, aided by self-replication and restructuring".

    When you are speaking of a "mindless process where matter, is a dissipation-driven organization, that naturally seeks self-replication to ramp up its ability to dissipate energy", the statement is incomplete. What is mind? We consider rest as mutual cancellation of all forces acting on a body. If one of the forces is removed or applied, the center of mass of the body moves in the same or opposite directions with attendant consequences. The point from which the motion starts is the mind. Thus, even inanimate objects can have mind. In humans, we have seen that unless mind is conjoined, our senses will not function. And mind operates only one channel at one time, though at a very high speed.

    Since we have the ability to plan for the future, we enjoy certain degrees of freedom. This is our freewill. This gives us the power of discrimination. When mind is used with discrimination, it is called intelligence. Because of our discrimination in decision making, we get attached to it. That is called egotism. When we reflect on our memory and review our decision, it is called sentiency. But all of these are mechanical processes - hence not consciousness.

    The above mechanism have certain pit-falls. Our attachment and memory affect our discretion. Thus, mostly, a proper decision making becomes biased and thus distorted. The same affects the so-called mathematical physics. For this reason, we have pleaded in our essay for replacing with physical mathematics.

    What is a dimension? If you define it precisely and apply to time, you will know the difference. Duration is nothing but a measure of time or time itself, because duration is the interval between events and that is the definition of time. How do you say that the "10th dimension of observable space, the tenth being infinite possibilities? Symbolic of infinity"? Before that you have to prove that there is a tenth dimension different from what we have defined.

    Anyway, we thoroughly enjoyed your essay.

    Regards,

    basudeba

    Dear Jim ! Let me first say that I like your essay, because you are asking a lot of questions and you try to make sense of the many scientific puzzle pieces that you studied in professional practice and academic theory. The hypothesis that the universe might have a beginning is an original formulation of the Hebrew Bible; the narration tells about the creation of living matter from matter, all this out of no-thing by 7 sound vibrations, with light and darkness as physical conditions of life on earth.Human beings operate as living clocks; we have invented the technical clock and the computer as extension of our brain. It is my conclusion that 'time' does only 'work' in living matter, e.g. biochronology; space and time are only moral dimensions to develop self-consciousness, the physical interplay only works by matter ('space') and energy ('time/light'), i.e. physical death converts our body from warmth into cold.

    Dear James

    I have taken James Putnams advice to read your essay, and although I havent finished, the opening is certainly very interesting. I will read on and return here with comment.

    My essay has only received 8 ratings, which is two short of the ten required for prospectively qualifying finals, with few days till close. Would you be willing to review my essay opening, with a view to read on if it should capture your interest please? James seems to think you might find it of interest. It is certainly a unique and novel perspective, I can promise you this much.

    http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/2890

    Thank you for your consideration

    Kind Regards

    Steven Andresen

    Jim,

    My energy hasn't been up to a lot of reading and dialogue, but rest assured that I enjoyed your ambitious essay and gave it my highest rating.

    I will comment on your parting observation: " ... the first and second law of thermodynamics, the first involving the store of energy and the second its dissipation, which the universe seems to be mindlessly moving toward."

    It would be mindless, but for the role of time. Overcoming dissipation is the theme of my essay -- and supports my early conjecture that things don't change in time; rather, time changes things. Spacetime itself stores energy, explained by Einstein as time dilation and by quantum mechanics as information.

    Good luck and best wishes,

    Tom

    James,

    Thanks for reading my essay. What I liked about yours was the cooperative spirit toward contributions from others. As you say, science is like pieces of a puzzle coming together and your review of several authors was refreshing since many of us become so absorbed in our own work that we stop learning. England's work was interesting because it describes life as a natural outcome of thermodynamic entropy. I felt that we had to look at the quantum level to see information gain but his work suggests otherwise. He could be right. I worked at the old Douglas facility in Long Beach for a while then moved to Eastman Kodak. At Kodak, I used to play with structures that would form from gelatin under the right conditions. Gelatin is an organic de-natured molecule and the structures (crystals?) were several meters long and very complex. It was almost as if the materials were seeking the life form they originated from.

    Good essay.

    Dear James

    Your essay is an easy readable account of present understanding of the universe by Physics, built on England's idea that what propels the universe is an urge to dissipate energy as fast as possible.

    Thermodynamics is just the simplest case of this property; in my opinion, with little relevance for the evolution of the universe. What really makes the universe to evolve is the tendency of matter to form ever-larger associations. This is a much more efficient form of dissipating energy, in accordance with England's idea. In my essay I do not mention it, due to the size limitation of the essay, but the "intelligence" of a system, as I defined it, is also a measure of the energy consumption - or dissipation - of the system. The "intelligence" of human societies depends on the availability of energy - the key for the evolution of ancient civilizations was the surplus of energy, or food, carefully sustained by strong politics of birth control, something usually not mentioned. When the control of the size of the population failed, the civilization lost "intelligence". A recent case is the control of the population in China. While a society does not find a way to control the population, there is not enough energy per capita for the society to have enough "intelligence" to evolve.

    Now, in relation to the picture you make of the universe, which in accordance with current ideas in Physics, I know that it is largely wrong. As I say in my essay, the cause of the apparent space expansion is the hypothesis no one considered - it is not the space that expands, it is the matter that is ... decreasing in size, loosing energy... in accordance with England's idea. Space expansion model is just a modern version of Ptolemy model, with dark energy in the role of the celestial spheres (driving stars away instead of around) and dark matter in the role of epicycles (explaining the motion of galaxies instead of planets). And truly the universe is much more interesting then you think - somewhat as the universe of Newton is much more interesting than the one of Ptolemy.

    Going away of England, I would say that "energy" is the amount of the perturbation of the medium that we call "vacuum" and that this perturbation tends to the equilibrium (i.e., to disappear) as fast as possible. But what happens to this "energy"? It does not simply vanish, it is transformed. In what? In Intelligence!

    Asimov wrote a story where he described the end of the universe, the final fade out; and at that last moment, something happens: Let there be light!

    I read this story more then forty years ago, I no longer remember many details, but in this aspect Asimov was in accordance with what I think.

    Concerning the voting, I don't see the voting system as the selection system - that role belongs to the Jury, or to the community members that are not authors of essays. I am now voting the essays considering other things, namely the inspiration I get from the essay, the exchange of ideas the author promoted, its commitment with the spirit of the contest. My vote reflects all that.

    All the best!

    Alfredo.

    James, an excellent essay.

    I especially appreciate "artificially intelligent systems humans construct must perceive and respond to the world around them to be truly intelligent, but are only goal-oriented based on programmed goals patterned on human value systems"

    I don't understand: "life exists because laws of increasing entropy drive matter to acquire life-like physical properties. Restructuring and making copies of oneself (self-replication) is a natural attempt to dissipate increasing amounts of energy." I look forward to reading England's paper.

    This was particularly elegant: "We wonder about ourselves, a living, breathing scalar example of universal things that live and die, achieving this cycle on a much smaller and less cosmic scale than a galaxy, composed of stars, planets, black holes, and gases, or the entire universe."

    I agree with what you wrote in your post on my essay, we are not so far apart.

    Given your interest in cosmology, you might be interested in my hypothesis that

    it is time, not space, that drives the expansion of the universe:

    http://eujournal.org/index.php/esj/article/view/990

    In any case, I rate your paper as a fine job.

    Dear James Hoover

    I greatly enjoyed your essay. What I credit mostly too, is the underlying and persistent theme that the very particular orders and complexities observed of this world, requires an organisational principle for explanation. An explanation convention does not provide for. That this is your focus speaks well to me. And I also greatly appreciated how you broke away from conventional views with speculations towards explaining Dark Matter, then attempt to identify rationalized anchor points for them within known observation. I thrive on these types of considerations. Nicely done.

    By the way, your criticism of my essay title is well founded. I do see your point.

    I feel the concept of entropy is wonderful, within bounds of the process of dissipation of heat, and processes that are observed follow on causes. However I am not a fan of the many ways entropy has become the extension for everything tool, Swiss army knife of physics. I feel that the comparison between heat dissipation and disorder is an erroneous association, and a misdirection which has been taken far by some. I like that Jeremy England is in pursuit of an answer for organisation principles of nature that explain physical orders of this world, however I dont see the connections he is trying to bridge. Like entropy being the champion of replication. Unless England can tell me how entropy is the cause for the properties of matter that then give rise to the capacity for molecular bonding, then it can only be applied after the properties of matter and bonding were established. It doesn't go deep enough to satisfy the organisational principle needed to explain the structure and function of atoms. Such a principle would need to be applied at the foundation.

    Its just that I have a bone to pick with what I view as the mistreatment of the entropy concept, which apparently I am unable to contain. It is made out to have implications in all universal physical circumstances, but what of entropic gravity? And why did matter condense out of the big bang inferno, defying the tendency of energy dissipation? The universe should have remained as a dissipating bath of radiation, given interpretation of entropy. These points contradict the popular view but are selectively ignored, it seems to me.

    Anyway, I'm off subject. This is not a criticism of your work, for which I am about to rate you highly. Very enjoyable read.

    Kind regards

    Steve

    Jim,

    as promised I read your essay

    (you commented already in my essay forum)

    At first, you are the second person which pinpoint to Jeremy Englands work. Certainly I hace to read it....

    I enjoyed reading your essay. I'm not a fan of iced universe (it is cyclic therefore fire or the flat space become instable, so fire again).

    Welldown (with a high mark from my side)

    All the best and good luck in the contest

    Torsten

    Thanks so much for your insightful essay. I really had never read England's stuff and was curious how his entropy differed from anyone else's. There really is nothing very unique or surprising in stating that entropy determines the arrow of time.

    Furthermore, life is a decrease in one system entropy at the expense of even more increase in bath entropy. England's argument is that the chaos of Shannon entropy and some simple rules necessarily result in life. This is very much like the cellular automata approach and argue that life is purely a result of classical entropy and some hidden rules.

    Of course, there is also quantum entropy and these classical approaches do not include any quantum entropy or quantum gravity. Therefore England's approach is not really complete. Note that buried in his logic are a lot of special rules to make life go where it is supposed to go.

    This is tantamount to rigging the answer in the complexification of the model. Finally, England's approach does not include the role of quantum gravity because of course, mainstream science does not have quantum gravity.

    Buried in the logic is a set of rules for entropy propagation that he simply invents. It would be much better to have those rules emerge from the quantum phase noise of quantum gravity, but science is not yet there...