Archive for April, 2023

The World of Illusion

April 25, 2023

People can choose to live in a ‘world of illusion’ because they don’t always like to face up to challenges, particularly if they have failed to deal with challenges in the past, or they don’t want to recognise that past choices (and support) have led to them to where they are now. Sometimes realities seem too painful to face up to, and sometimes those you identify with and would like to resemble, are those causing the problems you face.

There are also mystical traditions which say that facing up to the reality of eternal bliss now, conflicts with our current ways of life and our views of our self as limited and deserving of punishment.

The point is that recognizing reality can be painful, and disorienting and threatening to our established identity

If there is a major internal, or external struggle/paradox happening then it can be less painful to decide that reality is not threatening to your identity and way of life and, that you and yours, are not creating problems for yourself and everyone.

It is much easier to sell people the idea that they don’t have to do anything, and all will be ok, than to sell them the idea that they (and others) have made bad choices in the past, and that they are likely to suffer as a result, especially if the suffering has only gradually increased.

People also often find it easier to line up to fight irrelevancies, than to struggle against the real problems.

For example:

  • It is easier to fight powerless drag queens, who have very little connection to child rape, than it is to fight people in the religions you believe in, who actually do rape children and have the power to expel you or make you an outcast.
  • It is easier to side with fossil fuel companies and denounce the ‘liberal elite’ and the ‘scientific conspiracy’ than it is to admit that your use of fossil fuels, and products using fossil fuels, is causing a problem which may lead to you losing your home, and that you need to change your whole way of life to tackle climate change. Especially given the change comes without a guide, and great uncertainty as to how you would live.
  • It is easier to say renewables will solve everything than it is to deal with the problems of renewables, or the problems of the system they are embedded in.

All of us do this all the time, unless we start to realize it. Its difficult to face up to the likelihood we have been choosing to live in a world of illusion.

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Question about Entropy

April 23, 2023

I’m currently writing about energy, and I keep coming up against the concept of negentropy or negative entropy, and I just don’t get it. So it would be great if someone could explain it or point to a good URL. So far the urls or texts I have seen do not explain my issues away.

Background

You will all probably know the background ‘laws’ of thermodynamics of which two are particularly important.

0) Left to itself heat flows from a higher concentration to lower concentration. If two thermodynamic systems are each in thermal equilibrium with a third, then they are in thermal equilibrium with each other.

1) Energy can neither be created nor destroyed. The total energy of the universe remains constant.

2) Any use of energy will result in some energy being dispersed and becoming unavailable for use. This is entropy. The entropy of an isolated system [that is a system with no external source of energy] will tend to increase over time and, eventually, the system will cease to function.

3) At zero degrees Kelvin, no waste heat (entropy) is producible. [that is a paraphrase, which I hope is correct.]

Entropy is a process, not a thing. It is generally said to be irreversible. As a result, entropy marks time.

The Question

The question is what is the use and validity of the idea of ‘negentropy’. People seem to talk about the ‘consumption of negentropy’, which does not make sense to me at all. You cannot consume entropy, so how can you consume its ‘negation’? Are you violating the first law, which says energy cannot be created?

I’m assuming that negentropy arises because people want to make entropy equal to disorder, hence there is a problem of apparent increasing order as with life Life appears to build more and more complex order and repairs itself. (I think Schrodinger invents the term ‘negative entropy’ to ‘solve’ the mystery of life).

“[an organism] can only keep aloof from it [entropy], i.e. alive, by continually drawing from its environment negative entropy – which is something very positive as we shall immediately see. What an organism feeds upon is negative entropy”

What is Life p,71).

He goes on to ‘explain’:

If D is a measure of disorder, its reciprocal, 1/D, can be regarded as a direct measure of order. Since the logarithm of
IID is just minus the logarithm of D, we can write Boltzmann’s equation thus:

  • (entropy) == k log ( riD) .

….. entropy, taken with the negative sign, is itself a measure of order.

ibid: 73

I don’t like to think that I’m saying Schrodinger is talking bullshit as its hardly easy to justify, and in his defense there seem a large number of different interpretations of what he said.

What seems to be the case

However, there is nothing in the laws of thermodynamics, which says that with an external energy source, ‘processes’ cannot build what appears to be order, or even temporarily make a place exceedingly orderly. All that seems to be required to be recognised is that the building of order, maintenance, repair or regeneration etc., takes energy and disperses energy. Consequently, all of that energy is no longer accessible to the system. That is it. Energy is used and dispersed to make order. No need for negentropy, or consumption of negentropy, at all.

After a while, it takes more energy to keep the organism or information going, and it eventually breaks down (unless its a bacteria perhaps, but its not the same being after it has split many times). Again, this is connected to the Second Law in that energy is dispersed in attempting to make the order, and if something gets way too complicated it can take more and more energy to maintain, and run out of access to enough energy to maintain, and therefore starts breaking down.

Over time, the organism (or an information string if you want to tie entropy to information) tends to fail to replicate properly – there is not enough energy available to each complex organism to ensure that every replication is accurate all the time. Likewise it takes less energy to make up bullshit than it does to make up accuracy. This failure to replicate accurately can lead to evolution if failures prove ‘useful’ to further replication.

Maxwell’s demon sometimes seems to get tied in with negentropy. You all know this involves an imaginary creature opening a door to let gas particles accumulate in one side of a box. The imaginary demon’s actions (if it were to perform them) take energy. There is no apparent mystery. The box gets organised because the ordering takes and disperses energy.

So what does the idea of negentropy add to anything?

A Social science example

Let me quote:

Our main thesis is that the Anthropocene can be described as an Entropocene, insofar as the contemporary period is above all characterized by a process of the massive increase of entropy in all its forms (physical, biological, informational).

Internation. Letter to Antonio Guterres

In 1945… Lotka showed that the production of knowledge is the condition of the struggle against entropy for this technical form of life that is human life.

Internation: General Introduction

The general implication is that we must organise to defeat entropy and that life is negantropic.

However, entropy is a measure of dispersal of energy. The more energy is dispersed or wasted, the more likely that we won’t have enough energy to fix things up as they fall apart or get stressed. Therefore we need to make energy usage as efficient as possible, with as little loss as possible. Something no one aims at when energy is plentiful.

Making energy usage efficient does not stop energy being dispersed and entropy increasing. It is not negative entropy, it is not demaking entropy or consuming entropy, it just tries to make energy dispersal as minimal as possible.

footnote

Schrodinger tries to clear up his problem, saying

The remarks on negative entropy have met with doubt and opposition from physicist colleagues. Let me say first, that if I had been catering for them alone I should have let the discussion turn on free energy instead.

What is life p 74

“Free energy” as I understand the term is the available energy, which can be extracted and directed by the application of energy. For example, it takes energy to find food, eat it and digest it. The ‘free energy’ of food, has to provide more energy that it takes to find it, eat it and digest it, for it to be useful. Similarly sunlight is free, but we have to use energy to take it and convert it to electricity or warm water or whatever..

He also says

And that we give off heat is not accidental, but essential. For this is precisely the manner in which we dispose of the surplus entropy we continually produce in our physical life process.

Digestion and the uses of food energy to power and repair the body, disperses energy. There are other things going on as well such as maintenance of the body between a small range of temperatures.

This seems largely because he wants a direct equality between disorder and entropy, rather than an indirect and complex connection

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umair haque on Happiness

April 12, 2023

Summary of an important article here. Read it…

Haque argues that happiness, for humans, involves social activity, possibly pointless social activity. It’s a side effect of getting to really interact with people (of all types) in your own neighborhood and building connections unintentionally.

This is important because our society (neoliberal capitalism) does not encourage this form of connection at all. It encourages selfishness, fake individualism and misery, in order to make you largely helpless consumers, and stop you collaborating with people in general. Happiness has become a business, but real happiness is free. Unhappiness has become a political tool, to drive further unhappiness.

He opens. In Europe:

I leave the house. I can’t go twenty feet without someone shouting my name. Hey, Umair! It’s the old gay couple who lives around the corner. How are you guys, I shout back, over the roar of a bus and a scooter. Me and Snowy walk on. He sees one of his buddies. This is twenty feet later. They squeal in excitement, and I’m talking to Karina, little June’s mom, about her new job. We walk on, and thirty feet later, it’s my new friend Jane, who works at the cafe I’m going to, and she’s going to sing on one of my songs, because she’s an aspiring singer. Another fifty feet. An elderly lady swoons over little Snowy. Gets misty eyed. Tells me about the dogs she’s had. We stand there talking, and I get a little emotional, too.

Half an hour’s gone by. We finally make it to the cafe, which is five minutes up the street. And there, the whole thing starts over. The crew working at the cafe says Snowy! They pet him and he grins up at them. He begins to boop random people — it’s his favorite thing — and they lean down and say hi. Plenty of us begin. There’s a girl there who’s moving over from America, a young distinguished scholar, and we make quick friends. The couple we see every other day is there, and we talk about what’s new in the neighborhood.

An hour’s gone by. And I’ve barely had my coffee and begun to have my thinking time. LOL. In America? None of this happens. Everyone walks on by, in stony silence. 

Perhaps in the US, everything is so transient, or so dependent on precarious incomes, that people defend themselves by not bonding with each other casually. He continues

My happiness levels rise because of the way life is in my little neighborhood in Europe. They rise dramatically. It’s not a small thing. It’s a big one. In America? I go a couple of weeks without this intense level of daily sociality — and I begin to feel shaky. 

America has no hope of happiness, because everything is neoliberal, individual, a private good. There is, in the cities, at least no building of community, and this creates unease, and danger – anyone could shoot you. Indeed, breaking connection may lead many people to madness, making the streets seem full of danger increases that madness, and leads people to embrace organised closeness and protection as in street gangs or political gangs who denounce the other side.

Psychology’s come to understand this. This open secret to happiness: sociality. And it flips everything on its head, really. Think of the way that Americans chase happiness. All those books, classes, quests. Happiness is chased the way everything else is in America: as a private good…

Happiness is not a private good. So you can’t go out there and chase it individualistically that way, like a little atom. That’s why this happiness industry in America so often appears to be selling snake oil. 

Humans are social animals, not disconnected beings. they require connection to be content or happy, even if they don’t realise it, and keep contacts down to be safe . Probably Trump supporters get more out of associating with like-minded and bonded people than they do out of Trump’s words.

What does my little daily set of interactions in Europe do? I mean that literally. Think about it. To get to a cafe that’s five minutes away, I spend half an hour chatting. Laughing. Smiling. Knowing, sharing, giving, caring. Sometimes these encounters are with my neighbors. Sometimes they’re with perfect strangers. Sometimes, they’re mundane. Sometimes, they’re deeply moving and profound. But in either way, I am enriched. Vastly enriched. I’m lighter, having shared my own worries and concerns. I’m more joyous, feeling the happiness of someone else about something good in their life.

We are connected. 

Happiness to repeat is social – working together, being together. It has nothing to do with buying things, or being alone.

What does that mean happiness is? Happiness is a public good. That might sound trite, but I assure you, it’s not. Think again about America. How is happiness framed? Titles of a few of those bestsellers about happiness: “The Art of Not Giving a F&ck.” “How to Be a Badass.” America’s approach to happiness is about individualism, about having happiness as a private good, something you possess, own — like anything else in a capitalist society, really, no different from, say, a big house all your own, a sports car, a wine cellar.

But happiness, it seems to me — and to psychology, increasingly — is not that at all. It’s a public good. And that means that either we all have it, or we don’t.

That is the social secret that could help change society for the better. But who will risk it? who will not convince themselves they already have enough of other people?

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Marketplace of ideas

April 12, 2023

The idea of the marketplace of ideas is a good metaphor for what we live with.

The value of an idea is:

  • How easily it can be sold, to as many people as possible.
  • Whether it makes money.
  • Whether it supports the power and income of the firm who starts it off or promotes it.
  • Whether it helps you to buy further products or ideas from the promotor.

Not whether the idea is accurate or not.

Accuracy can:

  • Scare people so they want to ignore it, and
  • They won’t buy the idea, or further ideas from the promotor.
  • Be relatively incomprehensible if it does not meld with previously bought ideas.

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