Re: Entropy

So I got the following anonymous email today as a complement to a comment somewhere regarding the inevitability of the heat death of the universe:

Even if truth hurts, it is better to accept it and face the
consequences. I. e. that life is ultimately pointless and heads
nowhere. We lost. I laughed. Then cried. Soon I'm dead. Thanks. Not.

First, I want to point out that the reason for why I am writing my reply here rather than via email is because this message was sent by an Austrian remailer. I've had stranger things happen, but regardless, I'm not a fan of one-sided conversations where one of the parties isn't allowed to participate or defend his stance. The reply, unaltered, to... someone:

1. Why are you using a remailer? What are the consequences of revealing your email address to me? Is it so frightening to you to have me know who your ISP is -- or even just your mail provider? What could I possibly do with this information? Google you? Yikes!

Guess not everyone is into the idea of transparent communications.

2. When the ostensibly true "hurts," I embrace the pain for the greater good. What hurts more than the truth, though, is the human species' insistence on promoting absolute certainty with regard to epistemological claims. I find it fascinating that you are able to predict, with such alleged precision, events trillions upon trillions of years into the future. The time scales involved in your claims are absurd to imagine; as a result, your conclusions are even more so.

3. Current predictions regarding the heat death of the universe do not utilize the life variable, because doing so would make any subsequent claims baseless and erratic in conclusion. Life -- and, consequently, intelligent information agents, both artificial and organic -- resist entropic decay by actively seeking to keep themselves indefinitely open as systems. Given that I have no idea what the universe will look like in a trillion trillion years, I have no idea what the implications are for both the success and the failure of these processes. I also have no idea whether one outcome or the other will result; the future of information is more uncertain now than it has ever been in human history.

4. We are presently unable to detect approximately 95% of the universe, and only speculate that it exists because we can measure its effects on the 5% that we can observe. In what ways intelligent information agents will be able to utilize dark energy a billion years from now is unknown.

Something to keep in mind, here, is that, if protons decay into nothing at some point, the universe will not be empty afterward; on the contrary, it will be filled with energy -- so much energy that the energy content at this instant will be laughable by comparison. If current models of the universe are accurate, then dark energy will continue to expand the fabric of spacetime for, potentially, eternity. Does this mean anything for intelligence one way or another? No, because we don't know what dark energy is.

5. During Einstein's time, we only had evidence for the existence of a single galaxy; today, we are aware of hundreds of billions. Furthermore, recent evidence in the field of astronomy has pointed toward the possibility that the universe is at least 250 times larger than we've been thinking it is, and that, as a result of inflation, the light cone spanning the diameter of the visible universe is minuscule in contrast to the vast distance separating our central point of observation from all of material reality outside of the cone.

The moral of the story is thus: Never forget that your time period containing all of the answers to the universe's mysteries is an immense coincidence for you, and that everyone to have ever thought this has been wrong to date. Sometimes it is better to accept that we do not know much about our bizarre situation than to feign authority out of some psychological need to feel secure in our certainty that, yes, the universe is a fatalistic place, and there's nothing that we can do about it.

It may feel good to believe that everything is okay, but feeling secure in our certainty has the same effect regardless of whether we're sure that it's all okay or that it's all terrible. I can tell from your reply that you are consoled by your indisputable grasp on truth; it is, after all, easier to accept that everything sucks -- or that everything is wonderful -- than it is to accept that our context is a gigantic unknown. It's human nurture to tend toward confidence and security, after all. Not having an answer causes discomfort. We can't have that!

Having said all of the above, I have no hope for the future, and think that the most likely outcome for life on Earth is that it will all get eradicated when the sun becomes a red giant. If this does happen, it will be a horrific event, but it is possible that afterward, there will never be any horrific events anywhere ever again. 

Brains are the source of suffering - follow-up musing

1. Brains create pain; pain is not a native property of the things with which you traditionally associate it. If you're suffering, it's because your brain is a painful organ -- not because the stimulus affecting your neurological wiring is actually painful. Brains hurt.

2. Furthermore, brains create and poorly manage bad memes -- which, like the genes necessary for brains to exist at all, get passed on from generation to generation in the interest of staving off entropy. Brains are selfish and illogical.

3. The universe would be absolutely devoid of value if it weren't for the existence of sensation; even bacteria, which dominated the first three billion years of evolution of life on Earth, would be acceptable in a valueless universe, in no way compromising its neutrality. Prior to the beginnings of neurological functioning on Earth some billion years ago, it's possible that the universe wasn't the horror that some now think it to be; likewise, it's possible that it won't always be as horrible a place as it currently is. Brains are the worst, and thus most important, aspect of the universe.

Brains are the source of suffering

If the universe were a closed system composed of nothing but temporally "closed" subsystems, then the eventual entropic decay of each "isolated" system -- and of the universe itself -- would be inevitable. However, for some currently unknown reason, at some point in the past, a process called life emerged on at least one planet in the universe, effectively breaking the previously prevailing chain of tendency toward system disorder. Once this event took place, it became possible for systems that were more or less closed in the traditionally understood, macroscopic sense to -- almost contradictorily -- remain open -- by seeking out energy actively rather than passively.

Of course, to prevent integration with competing systems and other environmental parameters, these new systems also had to remain partially closed -- at least in the sense of putting defense and regulatory mechanisms in place. This kept the systems well-defined, with physical barriers and spatial limitations, while still allowing them enough openness to acquire the energy necessary for their perpetuation.

So what did this opening of otherwise self-contained, self-regulating systems accomplish? For starters, it introduced homeostasis into the environment. This was initially a radical, if meaningless, departure from the way in which energy had been transferred from one location to another in the past. After the fact of life's emergence, though, it turned out that the "mostly closed" systems, or organisms, were nevertheless quite susceptible to the various forces of the universe, and thus, entropy. Mobility and a binary attraction-repulsion system enabled them to disperse energy in an entirely new way, but other physical agents were still quite persistent in their vying for physical space, and were occasionally successful at bringing about states of maximum disorder among some living organisms; this eventually culminated in what we call death.

The organic instructions to resist disorder were mutually persistent, however; as time went on, organisms managed to find, by happenstance, new ways to perpetuate themselves -- even with both living and non-living "space competitors" vying for the same resources. Finally, a few billion years into this routine, one motivation mechanism of incredible efficacy arose -- sentience.

But why does it matter? What was sentience effective at?

Well, as it would turn out, the goal of sentience was not to help organisms "enjoy" their processes; rather, it was to stop organisms from decaying, as it had been with all previous biological mechanisms.

In short, this meant that neural nets would go on to continually birth, over and over again in successive generations, increasingly complex incentives for organisms to avoid behaviors and parameters conducive to their own destruction. At some point during all of this, fully robust brains emerged, and with them, not the capacity to feel pain, but pain itself. To put it succinctly, brains did not attempt to manage pain to the benefit of organisms; they attempted to manage disorder to the benefit of nothing, using the pain that they created entirely on their own as a motivator. We sneeze a lot when sick not because viruses convert themselves into mucus as they multiply, but because, to prevent the body from being destroyed, the immune system must produce mucus. We experience pain not because external agents are inherently painful, but because brains are painful while attempting to prevent disorder.

If you're not following along, again, "disorder" in this context refers to that lack of physical work that causes closed systems to literally "freeze," having no more energy to convert from one state to another; everything has been evenly distributed, and each piece is incapable of transferring energy to any other, or has itself decayed.

Is there anything wrong with decay, though? When two weather patterns collide and eventually disperse their energy content, leaving no further work to be done, is this a bad result? Is it something to be avoided, or even stopped at all costs? It doesn't appear to be, based on anything that we've ever observed; furthermore, without any good reason to invest in the god hypothesis, the agenda of brains (and of central nervous sytems as wholes) must be questioned, for the alternative to the god hypothesis is that the universe -- and thus, all constituents, including central nervous systems and other organic systems -- emerged.

This, if true, essentially means that no intelligent or coherent reason for the existence of life was considered beforehand by a rational entity in some planning stage. In the absence of any good reason to take the notion of a planning stage seriously, or the notion of there being a valid goal in preventing the decay of material systems, we more or less have to conclude that the brain's ability to create sensations in reaction to stimuli is not only unintelligent, but downright nasty.

So, to reiterate: Nothing capable of being received by a brain as sensory input is possessed of some innate unpleasantness; the brain, as part of the central nervous system, is chiefly interested in preventing the genotype, as an energy-dependent process, from decaying; to this end, the brain creates unpleasantness as a reaction to the "efforts" of external agents to bring about disorder in the system; however, there isn't any intelligent reason to believe that entropy is something to be stopped, making the brain's extremely painful efforts to stop it really unnecessary and unintelligent; additionally, every brain has failed or will probably fail in its efforts, and over 99% of them no longer exist.

Pain is bad, but is termination of life? If we were completely incapable of feeling anything, but, unlike bacteria, still possessed language, would we really mind dying? Are shark teeth bad because they can damage our organs, or because they hurt? Would you mind a lion ripping your guts out if it didn't hurt or cause intense fear, and if not, why is that a bad thing? If the AIDS virus were the only entity in the universe capable of replication, it would no longer be a terrible virus, for what do rocks care if they "get AIDS"? Brains create pain to preempt decay; get rid of all the brains and you could have a universe composed of nothing but AIDS -- with no problems whatsoever, anywhere.

The next time that you try to avoid a horribly painful situation, remember that it's not the world that you should be fearing -- it's your brain and its childish insistence on resisting entropy. Bullets, kidney stones, births, panic attacks? Bone cancer? They're okay in themselves. Really, the only thing that's actually capable of hurting you is that pink thing in your skull.