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acid andy (1683)
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Rationalistic, dualistic, vegan, cynical, scientific hippie
Is the universe broken? Is the universe evil? Does the universe reward evil? Mr Betteridge was unavailable for comment.
This is a follow-up to my earlier joural entry, Humanity Failed. When its admittedly pessimistic tone was pointed out to me in the comments, I wrote:
The point is that entropy means that it's much, much more more work to clean up and repair after a few bad apples have caused widespread harm and destruction than it is for those harms to be initiated. Advances in technology, the organization of large corporations and nations, and the sheer weight of numbers of the human population mean that today a handful of bad actors can easily wield sufficient power to ruin much of the world for centuries to come. At that point the strengths are irrelevant. Barring the invention of some self-replicating conservation bot, it's just too hard for the humans that care to keep healing the world when the ones that don't go on fucking it up on ever larger scales.
I admit it was all very bleak and one-sided. I do recognize that such a big decline is not the only possible outcome for humanity. It's just that having seen humans' greed, short-sightedness and ignorance triumph again and again over attempts to introduce greater compassion has made me believe that the decline is the most likely outcome, by a very long way. It doesn't necessarily mean that humans will become completely extinct, although they might, and it doesn't mean every last human will be destitute. I'm talking instead about an overall downward trend.
On this subject of entropy, Subsentient suggested perhaps the universe itself is broken in a sense that it rewards evil and chaos over goodness and order and that human misbehavior is a product of that. It's an interesting idea, which makes a certain amount of sense in that the second law of thermodynamics dictates that total entropy tends to increase over time, and I've certainly expressed my displeasure in the past about Heat Death as a likely fate of the universe.
I'm personally not inclined to blame the universe for humanity's ills. I wrote in the comments that entropy is what gives us possibilities and variation and without the countless disordered states, we wouldn't have many interesting and beautiful ordered ones. However, this is such an intriguing topic that I felt it deserved further thought.
Evolution can help to increase local order for a living organism, although everything any organism does, including what we'd normally consider morally good acts, increases entropy globally. It's something that nature has just had to deal with, work around, and often embrace. Death at the cellular level isn't a bug, it's a feature.
To answer whether our own universe might be broken, let's try to imagine a universe where the harmful aspects of entropy are less of a threat, a philosophical heaven if you like. Perhaps there could be some kind of limits on entropy. Matter could have a kind of memory (maybe some physical link to its past) that could favor it returning to an earlier, more ordered state. Say, for example, your house falls down, but all you have to do is start putting back a few of the bricks into the right place and it pops right back into its more stable and more ordered past state. While this might sound nice initially, without some serious tuning it could be catastrophically awful. Imagine a centuries old house spontaneously reassembling itself in the middle of your freshly prepared dinner. Or worse, in the middle of your body. It makes transporter beams look positively safe in comparison!
Another way a universe might seem less threatening could be if the building blocks of macroscopic objects could just be much harder to mess up and simpler to assemble, like a natural form of Lego bricks. The obvious problem with this particular design is it would massively limit the complexity of organisms and machines that could be constructed in the world. Things like brains might turn out impossible to build, so they'd have to be there since the beginning of time if you needed them to exist.
If these sorts of ideas were applied to our own universe, with the sort of problems I identified ironed out somehow, I think we'd be starting to get close to something a bit like some MMO game servers, where anti-griefing restrictions aim to limit the harm players can inflict on one another. In a game like Minecraft, for instance, some servers use block protection plugins or backups and rollback to stop griefers destroying players' buildings. This may make the more constructive players happy in the short to medium term but there are eventual limitations to how a universe like this can work.
The problem is that, just like our own civilizations, there's a limit to how many people such a world can support. If you ban the destruction of buildings, over time the world will completely fill up with them as the population increases. If you start to impose limits on building and land use, increasing numbers of people will inevitably end up homeless. A game server would avoid tricky moral issues like this by simply placing a limit on the number of players. On our own planet, population restrictions have been used occasionally with some success but they're exceedingly unpopular.
To take this idea, of modifying a universe's laws to make it harder to do evil, to its logical conclusion, one might hope that we'd end up with the sort of philosophical heaven we mentioned earlier. We might adopt a very carefully crafted moral code and make it into a physical law. For example, Azuma Hazuki suggested a modification of "love thy neighbor" into her Platinum Rule: "do unto others as they wish you to do unto them, provided you are not harming others in doing so." If we accept this as an absolute physical law for our universe it's likely to be an extremely rigid place, devoid of even the illusion of free will; lacking challenge; boring, even. Or perhaps even paradoxical. The more libertarian among us might call it the ultimate nanny state. To go back to our computer game analogy, it would be like an open-world game that is actually much too heavily scripted and restricted, disallowing much experimentation by the player that the designer didn't intend. Unless these moral restrictions on a universe arose by chance, such a place would be typical of what we might expect from intelligent design. In our own universe, we don't have these moral restrictions, so it's unfortunately (or fortunately) up to us to define the morals for ourselves. This is where I think we, as a species, fail, big time.
Some will say that nature places its own sort of Darwinian restrictions on the growth of a population, making the system self-correcting, and that it's only human sensibilities that cause people to want to reject such a brutal outcome. Certainly it's only humans on this planet that can speak and write about such suffering, but I think it's completely obvious that animals have just as strong an aversion to suffering, and in many cases empathy for the plight of others of their species and sometimes even other species. Where humans are unique is in the scale and speed with which they can change this natural system, either for the better, or, all too often, for the worse. Evolution can't keep up with the pace at which humans are changing their environment, causing a widespread loss of biodiversity. Along with many other species, we're all victims of humans' excessive success.
So, yeah, I still think it's not the universe that's broken, it's the human psyche.
(Score: 3, Funny) by fustakrakich on Thursday May 21 2020, @11:04PM (7 children)
Humans are natural too, everything about us. We need to stop thinking otherwise. I think the variety in behavior is extraordinary.
On the grand scale, socio/psychopathy is our biggest threat. We need to teach people how to recognize it, or it will take over
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Thursday May 21 2020, @11:49PM (6 children)
Too late...?
Master of the science of the art of the science of art.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Friday May 22 2020, @12:27AM (5 children)
Not at all. We're still here
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 22 2020, @04:54AM
They took over. Destruction is not instantaneous. We got seats to watch the fall of modern civilization. Easy to extract fuels and ores already have been extracted. In Geological scale they could bounce back, but Humankind is a blip in that scale. We can correct course or we will be just hairless monkeys that, at best, can speak and create stone tools in not so distant future. Even with corrections, good outcome is less and less probable as time passes.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Friday May 22 2020, @01:13PM (3 children)
Thinking about it, it's not just the obvious, certifiable, psychopaths that are the problem. On some level, we're all bigots. Almost all of us discriminate positively towards our own family, many of us our own nation, and most of us our own species. That's natural self-preservation and isn't in itself evil but it means it's exceedingly common for empathy to run out when it comes to--depending on the person--strangers, foreigners, animals, plants, or even a climate. Even if you think you're a good person, it's all to easy for one of those external groups to end up being a sort of collateral damage as you struggle to look after your own in life. A few hundred years ago that was less of a problem, but now it's more important than ever that humans all start to think of the bigger picture and their own part in it.
I've said before that the corporate world massively dilutes responsibility. When we work for it or fund it through purchases, we're basically crowd-sourcing harm. We don't feel like full-blown psychopaths because the harm is indirect. When it's a number of steps away from our actions, it doesn't feel evil, and yet the evil continues. Even the CEOs benefit from this dilution of culpability. They can tell themselves they're just continuing a culture that has been there for decades and would continue with or without them.
Your idea of shunning all sociopaths could make a difference eventually, because they're often the ones that make changes to a culture to make things even worse. But that alone is not enough. We need to fix what's already broken with the modus operandi.
Master of the science of the art of the science of art.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Friday May 22 2020, @04:28PM (2 children)
I read about the horrors of the past, and I am still convinced there's no better time than now, at least inside the garden, despite this little speed bump. Funny though, I still fear the future because of these small backwards steps we take. Still lots of walls to knock down.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Friday May 22 2020, @04:45PM (1 child)
That's because we're some of the lucky ones.
Are you talking about COVID or the Democratic Party primaries?
Master of the science of the art of the science of art.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Friday May 22 2020, @05:11PM
That's because we're some of the lucky ones.
*inside the garden* but the garden is getting bigger. I can talk to the whole world for thirty bucks a month. Such trivialities are making a difference.
Are you talking about COVID or the Democratic Party primaries?
No, the speed bumps aren't important, watch for the thing that turns them into tire spikes
The news is very bipolar. Don't know if it's a symptom or if it's a setup
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 4, Insightful) by aristarchus on Friday May 22 2020, @12:36AM (8 children)
There is a reason the Hobbits are the central characters in Tolkien's work. They are English, but without the nasty bits. That means they are simple people, but no fools; diminutive, but tough as nails when necessary. And it is the return to the Shire that makes all the high adventure make sense. It is the little things of everyday life that justify existence, whether a mug of ale, or a flower or a smile, or a cockroach in your kitchen. So chill, Andy, just chill.
(Score: 2, Touché) by fustakrakich on Friday May 22 2020, @12:49AM (3 children)
Ugly feet
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 22 2020, @03:38AM (2 children)
obsession with feet? fusty is ben shapiro confirmed! #AOC #footfetish
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 22 2020, @04:53AM
More a Troll, of Mountain Stone. Just keep 'em talking, till the sun comes up, and 120,000 Americans are dead, the Stock Market is kaput (German, appropriately, for "broken"), and the Hydroxychloroquinote kicks in, and he will turn to stone.
(Score: 2, Funny) by fustakrakich on Friday May 22 2020, @06:30AM
Mine are much prettier
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 22 2020, @07:03AM (2 children)
The hobbits are the central character group because you need a central character in any story. Tolkien repeatedly denied any sort of metaphor to society in his works and in fact they borrow heavily from Scandi folklore.
Analyzing them there is like people that try to find meaning in I am the Walrus.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by aristarchus on Friday May 22 2020, @10:00AM (1 child)
Oh, c'mon! It's obvious! The Elves are the French, the Orcs are German, The Southrans are the Southerners, mostly Moorish, and Tom Bombabadil is just too cool to make it into the movie! Something about the industrialization of the English countryside, Under the directions of Sauroman, as opposed to the idyllic pre-industrial ways of the Hobbits before backhoes and backhoe rental, and the ruinious idea of rent on property or return on capital were introduced into Middle Earth, or New Zealand.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 22 2020, @05:23PM
Which Star Wars movie is about the battle of Midway? Number 4, right? But with German storm troopers? Talk about mixed metaphors...
Harrison Ford is no John Wayne! But Carrie Fisher made a pretty good Maureen O'Hara.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Friday May 22 2020, @12:58PM
Or a twinkle in Sauron's eye? There are countless things that justify existence. I appreciate the positive sentiment but I wasn't trying to question whether there's any point to it all. Compassion, love, exploration, wonder, science, philosophy, discovery, pleasure and challenge are a few words that spring to mind. I thought the meaningfulness was already implied by what I wrote. If we felt it didn't have any purpose, we should all be happy to laissez-faire.
Hey don't fret about me dude. This isn't about me.
Master of the science of the art of the science of art.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 22 2020, @05:57AM (5 children)
I think the biggest problem with society today is very simple: fakeness. Here is a simple question for you Andy. Imagine some magical being poofed into existence. And he offered you $1 million if you agreed to let him poof me out of existence. And you, somehow, knew this was completely genuine. Nobody would ever know you did this. Life would go on, for most, more or less in the same way except you'd be a million bucks richer. Would you take it? If you're honest, there's about a 99.9999% chance you would. And *that* is what we are. And in fact for most people they'd probably say yes for way less than $1 million. I expect $500 would be plenty for most, though since you're posting on an esoteric tech oriented message board with a lengthy depressive come introspective post, there's a pretty good chance you're well enough off that the marginal utility of $500 is low enough to let you get your morals back.
And *that* is who we are. This doesn't mean you have no compassion. It simply means you do not have blind compassion. So for instance I'm far from wealthy but I wouldn't take a million for my wife, but I'd take far less for the vast majority of the world.
The goal should not be to try to change human nature, because that's just not going to happen. Instead embrace it and create systems that thrive upon it while directing in a good way. As an example of this take the difference between social economic systems, be they communism or socialism or whatever, and capitalism. The social economic systems are obviously vastly better in theory. Everybody can have all they need and nobody ever need go without. What's the problem? We're the problem. You have everything you need and never have to go without? Perhaps you can start taking it a bit easier at work. And for the political types at the top ensuring everything is fairly distributed well nobody would notice if just a bit goes missing. Anyhow, they can surely claim in their minds they deserve just a little something extra for their hard work - maybe their friends too, just a little. And piece by piece the system starts to implode from both the bottom and the top. Next thing you know you see the top go authoritarian to ensure the bottom keeps production up, the bottom starts hating the top and becomes even less motivated, and next thing you know you have a collapse.
By contrast capitalism, even at its best, sucks. Except by the mercy of others, you will have people starve. And some people who don't "deserve" (whatever that means) much, will end up with vast surplus while some of those who do "deserve" will struggle to make ends meet. It's a brutal and unfair system. Herman Melville of Moby Dick fame and Van Gogh are but two of the countless names that lived and died in relative poverty, only discovered immense fame long after their time. Yet because it embraces human nature, even in its worst case capitalism keeps chugging along. We went from a world where ice was a precious commodity, to one where even the poor have practically unlimited access to such and to even consider it valuable would be nonsensical.
So even if you want to imagine you're a Mother Theresa (who, by the way, was an absolutely awful person... but that's another topic) then accept that most people are not. And the best way to develop a society is to build the most solid foundation. And that is not only to accept but to embrace what human nature truly is, and simply direct it in a way such that its negative characteristics are minimized and its positive ones are exemplified. The only trick is to stop lying to ourselves about what that nature really is. It makes us feel good about ourselves, but it ends up creating a social foundation built on quicksand.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Mojibake Tengu on Friday May 22 2020, @07:06AM (1 child)
Yesss, the Ghoul of Calcutta. Thank you for bringing this up.
If we really wish to restore the Humanity, then The Cult needs to be uncovered in all the naked truth first.
And destroyed.
A tolerance to Evil is Evil. This is the way how we become evil ourselves, by tolerating evil.
The edge of 太玄 cannot be defined, for it is beyond every aspect of design
(Score: 2, Insightful) by fustakrakich on Friday May 22 2020, @07:40AM
The Cult needs to be uncovered in all the naked truth
No. Look what happened. We must bury the truth and rebuild the facade. *Back to Normalcy*
God save the Queen!
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2) by quietus on Friday May 22 2020, @02:46PM (2 children)
Actually, the majority of people will not poof you out of existence. What your first para describes is a variant on the Dictator Game [wikipedia.org].
There is a caveat though, which I do not see mentioned in that wikipedia entry. Elizabeth Hoffman and colleagues at the University of Arizona suspected that the dictators were only being generous (or, unselfish, to be closer to your example) because someone was watching. To strip out that influence, they built-in various steps of anonymity, and told every participant that some of the envelopes had no money at all in them, only blank paper -- so you couldn't be blamed if you did give no money. In that case [researchgate.net], about 60 percent of the dictators took all the money -- not close to spoofing someone out of existence, but still.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Friday May 22 2020, @04:01PM
Although it's not exactly the same, this reminds me of the point I made in another comment, that most of us are OK with doing harm so long as it's several steps removed from us. So, most people wouldn't be willing to poison someone for money, but they might consider it acceptable to work for a factory that makes containers for a pesticide that has been shown to cause cancer (if we accept for the sake of argument that the employee believes that evidence), or maybe a builder laying bricks for a cigarette factory.
Master of the science of the art of the science of art.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 22 2020, @07:28PM
Few things:
1) Marginal utility. I think humans are generally moral, but we set our morals aside when it's something we want. You need a prize that has reasonable marginal utility relative to the amorality of the behavior you're being asked to engage in. Most experiments are done where the difference has very near 0 marginal utility. I did not see the price mentioned there but having participated in plenty of these studies in college it's generally $5-$20 at most. This also ties in with #3 below.
2) No anonymity. Most people like to behave well when they think people are paying attention to their behavior. Regardless of whether or not the other person will know - the experimenters will know. And even in situations where the experimenters claim to have organized something in a such way that you can do whatever you like, most people realize they're probably lying. Many if not most psychology experiments rely on some deception, and it's usually pretty obvious.
3) Biased sample. On top of experiments generally offering low marginal utility, they also tend to be performed on college students. College kids living off ramen is a meme. Now a days everybody is plied with endless loans that give an extremely distorted perception of the value, relevance, and role of money in society. And 'back in the day' you'd have a more direct sample bias since most folks going to college were disproportionately intelligent + well to do.
A more general issue with these sort of experiments in general is also experimenter bias. The experimenters are often trying to push the participants in a certain way to get the outcome they want. This goes all the way back to the famous Stanford Prison Experiment which participants have somewhat recently revealed was basically just fake. The way the bias manifests is something you can't really specify, but it shows up constantly. It deeply undermines psychology and is probably a big part of the reason they are now having a huge replication crisis where especially for things like social psychology it turns out that the vast majority of stuff cannot be replicated.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Friday May 22 2020, @09:46AM (11 children)
Unless you believe in intelligent design, the chaotic universe let life emerge as a form of organization of matter. So, the universe is not broken.
The problem today is that evil generates sociopaths that increase evil, but it is our problem, not the universe's. We stand on waste and breath waste, AKA earth and oxygen respectively. Meanwhile the energy expenditure and impact of operating and dismantling a greta approved wind turbine may be well miscalculated.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Azuma Hazuki on Friday May 22 2020, @12:55PM (7 children)
What the hell is this creepy obsession with Thunberg? Grown-ass men two or three or more times her age all over her like corruption on the Nixon administration...eesh. You don't even have a place in this discussion; you're one of the very death cultists causing most of this crap in the first place.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Friday May 22 2020, @06:18PM
She wouldn't be on the radar, if it weren't for the creepy obsessions of the people using her and subsequent huge media exposure. Someone needed a Joan of Arc figure in the first place because they couldn't come up with a credible argument. The whole thing is religious buffoonery.
(Score: 0, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 22 2020, @09:15PM
Why are you so easily distracted and triggered by completely superfluous bullshit? It is a weakness that will doom you
You're such a typical Social Justice Weenie!
(Score: 0, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 22 2020, @10:36PM
HA! I love it! You go completely off topic with your little whine fest there,and you mod me "offtopic".
So very typical!
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Bot on Sunday May 24 2020, @04:24AM (3 children)
Somewhere in zumi's source:
if msg.contains("greta"): rant();
else: rant();
end
Account abandoned.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 24 2020, @05:05PM (2 children)
Better than your weird hate-pedo-fetish.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Tuesday May 26 2020, @01:31PM (1 child)
LOL
piece of evidence one, the How Dare You speech.
piece of evidence two, random anti greta video.
method, examine the facial expressions, compare them to well known emotions
question, who hates whom?
Account abandoned.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 27 2020, @06:25PM
Gee, I'm so sorry I offended you by pointing out how creepy your obsession with Greta is. Why do you care what some kid is saying? Oh right, you're a hate filled creep.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Friday May 22 2020, @05:36PM (2 children)
the chaotic universe let life emerge as a form of organization of matter.
Whaddya mean "let"? It was helpless to prevent it. The sidewalk can't stop the weeds from growing through the cracks. You think life is gonna let some stupid "universe" get in the way?
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2) by Bot on Sunday May 24 2020, @04:31AM (1 child)
> The sidewalk can't stop the weeds from growing through the cracks.
It can by not existing, or by being a pool of lava.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Sunday May 24 2020, @06:14AM
being a pool of lava
Well, close [oceana.org]
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 3, Interesting) by hendrikboom on Friday May 22 2020, @03:57PM (3 children)
Someone once told me that God realized that human beings need to solve problems to be happy. He therefore deliberately created an imperfect world, and left it to us to perfect it.
We have done a remarkable job, but we're not done yet. The world is *clearly* not perfect.
-- hendrik
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 22 2020, @10:41PM
Ah, and the Bible is the rulebook. Have to make it perfect, can't kill all humans or go full hedonist... Please switch it to easy mode.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Sunday May 24 2020, @04:33AM (1 child)
>God realized that human beings need to solve problems to be happy.
This is why everybody likes to go to school and solve the math problems on the textbook, right?
Account abandoned.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by hendrikboom on Sunday May 24 2020, @08:27PM
Problems that matter to them.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday May 22 2020, @06:09PM (5 children)
It strikes me that your reasoning that led to the deduction that the universe is broken, was based on coming up with a variety of ways one could fix the universe and determining in turn that each of these ways has drawbacks larger (in your opinion) than what they're fixing. Crudely, the universe is in a state where fixing something makes something else worse in a way that made the whole thing worse, and thus, that is why it isn't broken.
For humanity's psyche to be broken, we must have some sort of fix that doesn't have a huge trade-off. I suggest performing the same analysis, keeping in mind several things:
I think a similar analysis would indicate that humanity and its psyche aren't as broken as supposed!
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Friday May 22 2020, @07:07PM (4 children)
Would banning gerrymandering and opaque voting machines qualify as not having a huge trade-off? OK, I'm unashamedly sliding into politics* and it's treating symptoms of the flawed human psyche rather than going to the root cause, but it illustrates some things that are broken in human society that could be fixed without a huge trade-off.
I'd suggest the less evil option is to try to redefine the incentives so people are motivated to act in a way that has wider-reaching benefits (and fewer harms) than the simple profit motive does currently.
That's definitely not for me to answer. If any replacement eventually happens, it certainly shouldn't be by force.
*I rather suspect that's what's motivating your response in any case.
Master of the science of the art of the science of art.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday May 22 2020, @07:36PM (3 children)
Both have present day fixes BTW - sue in court. It's not great, but nobody has figured out better rules for these things.
We already implement much of that. Plus, the simple profit motive doesn't really exist in isolation anywhere in the world.
This is one of the things bothering me about the subject. We already do a vast amount of stuff that improves us and our impact on the world.
It's not, though I have thought about it. It's one thing to be replaced by ourselves, just in better bodies and minds. It's completely different to be replaced by a ruthless Skynet. The latter is not a legacy I'd like to pass on to the universe.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday May 23 2020, @01:22AM
A key problem with both is that they get decided by a branch of government, usually the state legislature for districting and state executive branch for voting machines. So by the time it becomes a problem, it's already been accepted by one branch of government, nominally within legal bounds. The courts are the usual way to resolve that sort of mess, involving a branch of government.
And the issues are complex, which is where corruption thrives. It's hard to come up with good distributions - what counts as a fair distribution with so many conflicting interest? Or the characteristics of good vote recording systems. But it's easy to come up with bad distributions (maximize one party's representation while minimizing a second party's representation as is done in the US so often) or bad systems (installing a backdoor is a lot easier than insuring there are no backdoors).
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Saturday May 23 2020, @10:34AM (1 child)
I meant politics motivating your response, not a replacement of humans. Follow the asterisks.
Master of the science of the art of the science of art.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday May 23 2020, @10:51AM
(Score: 3, Interesting) by c0lo on Tuesday May 26 2020, @04:06AM (1 child)
Assuming the purpose of life: maximize the entropy where it exists.
Way of action:
1. getting the local pockets of Universe it occupies out from "dead-ends" and make possible a higher "quality" of chaos. E.g. a blue photo that's captured by photosynthesis worth 2 IR photons + petty change.
2. speed up the increase in entropy. Because fighting to maintain a very localized order produces more disorder in the entire Universe faster
Now, important, time is also part of the "equation" - obliterating Earth in a second will certainly create a lot of entropy, but long term is suboptimal - heaps of gamma ray photons with nobody around to transform them in a lot more IR ones. Simply warming the Earth globally until is boiling Venus-style it's a lot better than nuking it into cosmic dust, but even that is not the best that you can do - simply maintaining the life for longer times is going to produce more chaos then just letting the job to simple physical processes.
Very hard to translate what "not harming others" means. So how about adopting this strategy
That is maybe equally vague as any other ethical choice, but automatically casts an aura of profoundness and sciencyness on anyone that publicly espouse it. (grin)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday June 02 2020, @07:34AM
JoeMerchant and I were idling speculating on the survivability of blowing up a galaxy and what it would take. Nice to know that this sort of thing is the destiny of life.
Or you might want to rethink that purpose.
My take is that the maximizing of entropy will happen no matter what. Life will just make the trip interesting!