2017/08/24

Posted by z. On August 24, 2017
Order is among the main things we try to achieve in our music, 3d-enviro and everything else. Looks like it's nothing new: the Khufu pyramid creators pursuited the same goal; Schrödinger wrote about it in his work "What Is Life?". Lately scientists tend to make an assumption that we - putting it simply - "eat" entropy - and not energy, as was considered before. At "tonux.gix" we've instantly got to like such an idea - we love discussing things like meaning of life etc... What is all this richness of the forms about if all we do is simply convert energy back and forth. However, if to assume that we deal with order, things start to make more sense: every form of life on Earth consumes light from the Sun. The Sun is considered the source of life on Earth. The essense of the idea is that it's not so much energy that is crucial, but it's low entropy.

In the given case, entropy means structuredness. Something of low entropy has lower probability of emerging by chance. In mathematics, it is totally ok to assume that complex, diverse in their structure and content things can emerge "on their own" if enough time is provided. But maths says that the probability of such outcome is close to zero. And that means low entropy. On the other hand, structure that's comprised of similar elements - like say a pile of sand - is more likely to create this or another combination and thus has higher entophy. The energy we get from the Sun is concentrated in a smaller amount of protons than the energy that we afterwards put out. The Sun energy has lower entropy, thus it turns out that we consume low entropy.

Such perspective explains why we always went to great lengths to show off our highly ordered structures such as castles, temples and pyramids: we "eat" order - with our mouths, eyes, ears. It also provides us with the key to progress: it becomes clear that complex well-ordered structures at times may seem chaotic to us untill we understand them. By expanding personal capability of seeing the essence of things - with the help of tools and achievements of other people - we go down that road. It is rarely admitted, but it becomes more and more apparent that, compared to the structures found in a smartphone's software, greatest pieces of the world's architectural heritage look like piles of sand. Somehow we manage to create wonderful structures with ever lower entropy. It all began long before we were humans, and even before we began to form multicellular organisms...Now we have this unique decipherer, conventionally called the brain. Similarly to how a bicycle is an extension for the function of our legs, we've now invented an extension for the brain too. This "braincycle" will soon go out of control, and then we will have less cases for optimism :) But as of present time we still believe we exist and even discuss things like entropy. It gives us a chance, my friends!

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