- #36
Ryan_m_b
Staff Emeritus
Science Advisor
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- 721
I think you are simplifying things here. It would be better if you had a definition for these terms. What do you mean by "savagery"? Does driving thousands of bulldozers through the Amazon count as savagery and chaos? Do a pod of killer whales co-operatively hunting to smash up icebergs and drown seals could as order or chaos? These are very vague terms and it really depends on what side you are on as to what you think of it.gatztopher said:Cooperation could be a useful tool in causing chaos. Likewise, savagery can be a useful tool in promoting order. Now, would you prefer to have order through savagery or cooperation? I presume the latter.
I don't think this is true. Humans strive for safety and happiness. You're use of the term order here is confused because you are using it for two meanings at once. Order in thermodynamics means something completely different to order in a social setting. In the former we are talking about the distribution of free energy, in the latter we are subjectively referring to the efficiency and regulation of a system.gatztopher said:I'm simply going off the assumption that life, and humanity, strives for order to the maximum that free energy will allow us. I don't think it's a ridiculous claim - here we are, the most successful large land animals by a hundredfold, complaining daily about how the world just isn't safe enough for us. "We need more control! More order! More brotherhood! Things are too chaotic!" It goes a little beyond rationality, but it's our nature.
Humans don't strive for order in the entropy sense, if we did we would act to create huge edifices of stored energy and kill everything to make sure this order lasts as long as possible. In reality by increasing our energy consumption we increase disorder. In addition human behaviour is highly multifaceted, to say that we strive for order is not entirely true because many people in many different areas of life strive for the opposite for many different reasons.
Are you sure you want to use these terms and go down this route? If you do you should really read up more on evolution and especially evolution of group co-operation and behaviour.
I would have to ask; what's the competitive advantage of being an organism that is averse to co-operation? How even would intelligence evolve (note that many hypotheses about why humans evolved intelligence revolve around our co-operation). You don't have to explain that of course but if I were reading your book it would spring to mind.gatztopher said:Whereas, these monsters, born of life-inside-out, strive for chaos to the maximum. "Less control! More chaos! Less coordination! Things are dangerously organized!"
gatztopher said:Edit: I might even go so far to say that it would be naive to assume thermodynamics doesn't impact our social traits. Such simple things as the length of a day or a season have tremendous implications for civilization (nevermind life), yet something as grand as a universal tendency doesn't? Entropy isn't a phenomenon you have to be going near the speed of light to confront. It's in the machinery of every fiber of every being.
I highly disagree. We have no instinctual understanding of entropy. Of course it shapes our lives and our evolution but it is totally not the same as our relationship with the sun, you are comparing apples and oranges there. It's like saying that it would be naive to assume quantum mechanics doesn't impact our social traits. It doesn't other than to be a mechanism by which physics, chemistry and therefore biology works.