The rebellion of order: Why your existence is a defiance of cosmic law

The rebellion of order: Why your existence is a defiance of cosmic law

Shreya Ishita, MFin, BSc

Ishita argues that life, which in a sense can be regarded as a local “violation” of the second law of thermodynamics—the universal tendency towards disorder—, betrays the presence of a universal “prime directive” towards conscious self-knowledge. In elaborating on her argument, she brings together the ideas of Thomas Campbell, Donald Hoffman and Federico Faggin, in a way that highlights their surprising complementarity. In Ishita’s view, the second law of thermodynamics is merely the necessary background that delineates the foreground of self awareness.

When we confront the materialist paradigm with this paradox of life versus entropy, the standard response is one of cosmic accounting.

Physicists correctly point out that the Second Law of Thermodynamics applies to a closed system. Life obeys this rule because it pays for its internal order by exporting disorder to its environment. The sun burns fuel to feed the plant; you consume the plant to fuel your mind. The entropy of the solar system goes up so that yours can go down. The equation balances out; the law is satisfied.

But while this explains the how, it remains loudly silent on the why.

Why this will towards organized complexity locally, when the backdrop is chaos globally? Why this relentless goal-directedness towards order, when matter is destined to disorder? Materialism can explain the thermodynamics of a beating heart, but it cannot explain the anomalous will to live. It describes the mechanism, but ignores the motivation.

They seem to have an interesting argument but they seem to shift between saying the universe's laws are the backdrop by which life mysteriously manifests versus our existence being a defiance of physical laws.

Admittedly I don't believe in "laws" of nature, I am not even sure the idea in absence of God has much coherence. But I think the short essay would have more weight if it were a bit longer and clearer. There must be physicists who've given naturalistic explanations for why life exists, it'd be nice to see those rebutted. Ideally something for future content.

[Laird]

they seem to shift between saying the universe's laws are the backdrop by which life mysteriously manifests versus our existence being a defiance of physical laws.

Yes, that's one problem. The essay goes from "The equation balances out; the law is satisfied" to "We are local forms of order that the laws of physics say shouldn’t exist". It's not clear then whether the author is ultimately claiming that life satisfies the laws of physics or defies them.

Another problem is that in arguing that materialism cannot explain will and motivation (to live and complexify) despite being able to explain the mechanism of complex life (with the caveat above that the article ultimately equivocates on this), it begs the question against materialists, who deny the existence of and need for will and motivation in the first place to explain both the origin and complexity of life.

I think the short essay would have more weight if it were a bit longer and clearer. There must be physicists who've given naturalistic explanations for why life exists, it'd be nice to see those rebutted.

Agreed. This brings to mind the dinner table conversation from the video Kam posted in late 2023 to your 2019 thread Chemist James Tour: "Life Should Not Exist".

In particular, I'm thinking of the conversation between 1:54:16 and 1:58:53, in which one of the dinner guests references non-equilibrium thermodynamics and claims that Ilya Prigogine proved mathematically that in such states (with some additional conditions), systems inevitably complexify, and that this describes most of the universe.

My reaction is like that of another of the dinner guests, who doesn't have any idea whether or not this is true, but my point is that this essay would have been more constructive if it had (also) addressed arguments like that, even though folk like me would have been hopelessly unqualified to assess the merits anyway.

Ideally something for future content.

But why expect anything ideal from Essentia Foundation? 🤔