Entropy

Some time ago, I read a book by Penrose called "The Emperor's New Mind" that argued against the possibility of artificial intelligence. As indicated in a previous post, I believe artificial intelligence is a misnomer; it should be referred to as hyper-discipline. Penrose's approach was to make plausible alternatives to the assumptions of artificial intelligence researchers. One alternative was that evolution decreases the entropy of life by dissipating the entropy to space. Just as discovery of extraterrestrial intelligence would have more consequence to social paradigm than to scientific advancement, a precise definition of life in terms of entropy would have more consequence to social paradigm than to science. In this post I will attempt to collect some elements of a model of the human condition. With admitted imprecision, I define life as anything that dissipates entropy without creating too much entropy in an environment that dissipates enough entropy, where "too much" and "enough" mean that the entropy of the environment in general decreases, where "in general" is left undefined. Furthermore, I define science as a plane with life and the minimum entropy at the origin. In this scheme, technology is lines in science not through life, and the further technology gets from life, the more entropy it has. To me, the only purpose of wealth is to influence people's opinions. For example, consider Caltrain, the diesel commuter train between San Jose and San Francisco. The beneficiaries of electrification and elevation of this train would include the lower income communities between the expensive communities at its ends, because then they could live inexpensively, and work lucratively. However, a Luddite or NIMBY mentality reduces progress. Who benefits from mentality that reduces progress? My conclusion is that developers are using their wealth to promote mentality that slows progress. A similar argument would apply to climate change. Thus, in my model of the human condition, money is how opinion is shaped, opinion determines which technologies are used, which technologies are used determines the creation of entropy, and the creation of entropy determines sustainability. Note that environments, civilizations, technologies, species, and behaviors that produce more entropy last less long. The moral is that being obliged to discontinue a behavior is less pleasant that choosing to discontinue it.