Entropic Systems and Black Holes


A considerable amount of confusion in the comparison of humanities, cognitive science and physical science derives from a more fundamental mix-up about thermodynamics. The laws of thermodynamics, including the fact that heat energy will never flow from a colder to a hotter location, support the belief in entropy: in a closed system, energy will eventually wind down to zero.

Entropic systems seem to be in all physical areas we examine: the Rockies wear down, the planets ultimately stall and tumble, stars go nova or dwarf perhaps ultimately collapsing into black holes, and the suns go out.

Awareness, however, seems to offer a counterpoint to this universal pattern. It belongs to the class that could be called anti-entropic systems. For example, the burning curiosity of healthy attention can take entire belief systems and release them to the winds in an instant; but it can equally well pursue facts, experiments, acquired data over years and construct from them a more and more organized body of knowledge. Likewise, humans can build social patterns, organize objects to make shelter and tools, and ultimately communities.

The impact of anti-entropic force (directed force) on entropic matter brings about order which is maintained by the addition of energy correctly channeled into well-estimated efforts. Houses get painted, boats scraped and dishes washed. Systems get rebooted and data copied to backup disks, Inventories get updated and factories renovated. All this is very noncompliant with the desires of entropy, which is essentially to decline into chaos.

It seems true that in the material universe even the building blocks used by anti-entropic influences are subject to entropy: paint wears, dishes break and disks are erased by gamma rays or other flukes.

But the important difference is not that entropy rules the material universe but that there is a process which is non-entropic also going on.

Its earmarks are tending toward order, seeking survival, and ultimately coordinating understanding; that of entropic systems is tending toward disorder, seeking decline of forms and ultimately discoordinating things toward chaos, and incomprehensibility or apathy.

Other evidence exists in the world for the argument of a bi-polar system. For example, there is an unlimited horizon to the imagination (the extreme of anti-entropic action); conversely, the extreme of entropic action, the black hole, has an irreversible limit beyond which events seem impossible(although occasionally some escape).

In the entropic universe the only path to actual annihilation is for a particle to meet with its true opposite: its antiparticle.

In the anti-entropic universe, apparently, the only way to actual annihilation of any apparency is for that apparency to meet; its perfect duplicate, created with the same space in the same time and location, by awareness. Once that happens that apparency vanishes and only a cloud of understanding--the ultimate lubricant--remains.

"According to Einstein, no conceivable experiment performed in an inertial frame can detect the absolute motion of that frame.
A preferred inertial frame, however, may exist--namely, that of the BACKGROUND RADIATION that is a remnant of the original big bang from which, according to modern cosmological theory, the universe was formed. The solar system is apparently moving through the radiation in the direction of the constellation Leo at a speed of almost 400 km/sec (250 mi/sec)."

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