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Author
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Topic: Is 2nd Law a special case of 4th Law?
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Christopher D. Beling
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Member # 723
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posted 14. October 2006 11:55
Richard you say
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At the instant an organism dies the thermal entropy and the configurational entropy are intact.
With this I totally agree.
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there is nothing missing yet the organism has ceased to function.
Here I disagree - there is one very important missing ingredient - its the energy (1st law). As soon as the heart stops pumping cells will stop recieving energy - that's what causes death don't you agree?
Sal: - I am convinced that "configurational entropy" lies on the 2nd law side [not the 4th]. I mean to demonstrate this more clearly to you when I can get more time. i.e. I want to persuade you (if I am correct!) that the 4th law must be construed of more correctly in terms of changes in CSI only, - the 2nd law deals only with changes in system entropy [of which configuration entropy is just one component].
Mel: - When I have a little time I will argue that the input of chemical energy is fairly undirected. But I do have to ask - what do you mean by "directed" - it is not a standard scientific concept. I kind of know what people mean but think that a tightening up the definition or concept of "directed" vis-a-vis "undirected" energy is necessary? - Chris
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Richard Oldani
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Member # 2606
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posted 15. October 2006 22:30
Chris, I would like to take issue with something you said, quote:
I am convinced that "configurational entropy" lies on the 2nd law side [not the 4th].
Because these are mathematically defined concepts I guess you can do that if you want to. Mathematics allows a certain amount of freedom in its physical interpretation, but is that desirable in a theory of nature? Look what happened to a different theory, quantum mechanics, which has great mathematical freedom. There are physicists who talk about parallel universes, particles called tachyons whose minimum speed is c, hidden variables, a "god" particle, a wave function to describe the universe, etc. etc. These are all publishable subjects, but the problem is none of them has yielded anything useful. A mathematical idea or theory is only useful if it is tempered by the physical phenomena/experimental facts it describes.
In your "theory of thermodynamics" the second law describes observable structure and is measurable. The configurational entropy is neither observable nor measurable. So how can you join the two in any meaningful way? You seem to want to simplify (or generalize?) your description of a system by applying a single law. IOW the system boundaries are completely arbitrary. If true then why not also include the entropy represented by galaxies? They also have observable structure. I'm sure you can write an equation to do that, but what purpose would it have? Even though we may speculate about imaginary thought experiments we have to keep our feet planted firmly on the ground as dictated by experiment. quote:
What one does not put into the equation will not finally be given by the mathematics. James Franck
By the way, that thought experiment of mine was meant to question the use of entropy as a means of describing life systems, not as a way of defining death.
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perplexity
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Member # 2675
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posted 16. October 2006 06:09
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"- what do you mean by "directed" - it is not a standard scientific concept."
Of course not. While science is about determinism, "direction" is usually about free will; it implies a decision.
Conceding the possibility of an inherent system to somehow apply to the circumstance, it would still beg the question of how it got to be there to begin with.
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"These are all publishable subjects, but the problem is none of them has yielded anything useful."
There is at least the entertainment value. That is what attracts me to the argument, the philosophical amusement. I think of it as the Stephen Hawking tendency, science as a creative pursuit, the attempt to market natural "laws" while the Emperor's New Clothes are nothing much more than speculation, to the innocent child.
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"The configurational entropy is neither observable nor measurable."
![[Eek!]](eek.gif) So what the hell is it then? Which particular necessity was the mother of this invention? ![[Confused]](confused.gif)
It looks more like a last ditch fig leaf to cover the embarassment of the need for a divine creator.
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"By the way, that thought experiment of mine was meant to question the use of entropy as a means of describing life systems, not as a way of defining death."
Sure enough, but what then is the issue except to differentiate between life entropy and death entropy?
This is really about the anthropic principle rather than the entropic principle, what might be called the convenience of intelligent design.
To progress any further there is going to have to be a reconsideration of the very axioms that the scientific edifice was built upon, which is not going to be so easy to repair without a demolition of the structure.
"Every system changes its mind by breaking." --(William Ross Ashby)
-- RH.
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Melvin H. Fox
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Member # 1684
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posted 16. October 2006 14:58
The living system possesses a device or conglomeration of devices which seek out, capture, collect, organize, transform, and utilize energy in a directed “intentional” path. A star orchestrates no direction over its own processes and does not violate the 2nd law as you have outlined. A starfish, by no law of necessity, inserts its stomach inside the shell of a mollusk in order to initiate the directed path of energy utilization.
All I am asking is this; does any other system besides a living system violate the 2nd law in the way you have outlined?
-Mel
P.s. Does any living system exist that does not violate the 2nd law as you have outlined?
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perplexity
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Member # 2675
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posted 16. October 2006 17:06
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Does any living system exist that does not violate the 2nd law
This would depend on what is meant by "living system"
It is tempting to suppose that with a living system there is some sort of active will to live in effect, and to look toward that for an energy to operate.
The trouble then is that the anthropic principle comes into fashion because of the view that the Universe appears to be "surprisingly hospitable to the emergence of life":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle
If "living system" has to extend to the environment deliberately arranging itself to encourage life, then we are back once again to the Garden of Eden version: God's aversion to entropy.
--- RH.
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William Brookfield
Member
Member # 565
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posted 16. October 2006 19:19
John A Davison (pg 12)
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living systems are'nt "fleeing the second law."
I must confess that as a self respecting "living system" I am indeed "fleeing the second law" (I don't wish to approach equilibrium anytime soon). It's just as my mother used to say "Don't go outside without a coat, you'll catch your heat death." I figured she was crazy at the time.
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John A. Davison
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Member # 1425
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posted 17. October 2006 05:38
William Brookfield
Did I say that? If so where? I can't seem to find it.
"A past evolution is undeniable, a present evolution undemonstrable."
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Richard Oldani
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Member # 2606
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posted 17. October 2006 05:49
Perplexity your name is well chosen. These are difficult questions which I have been struggling with for 30 or more years. I find it entertaining also but if one insists on truth and accuracy it is also hard work. In the words of Richard Feynman:
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“The whole question of imagination in science is often misunderstood by people in other disciplines. ...whatever we are allowed to imagine in science must be consistent with everything else we know; that the electric fields and the waves we talk about are not just some happy thoughts which we are free to make as we wish, but ideas which must be consistent with all the laws of physics we know. We can’t allow ourselves to seriously imagine things which are obviously in contradiction to the known laws of nature. ... The problem of creating something which is new, but which is consistent with everything which has been seen before, is one of extreme difficulty.”
Feynman, R.P. 1963. The Feynman lectures on physics, vol. 2.
IOW if you want an explanation of life processes you have to go back to first principles and take into consideration all that has gone before.
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So what the hell is it then?
Configurational entropy does not appear in any physics books that I know of. I think it was invented to satisfy someone's need to categorize things. Perhaps it comes from the belief that if we label something with a fancy name then we understand it. In physics we have "complementarity" as an example meaning that photons can behave as particles or waves. Bohr thought it up to explain something he didn't understand. The reason I don't believe it is a valid concept is supported by the following excerpt from the ISCID site and can be found elsewhere as well.
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Source: EMBO Reports. The European Molecular Biology Organization.
Reductionism and complexity in molecular biology
Marc H.V. Van Regenmortel
November 2004
“The reductionist method of dissecting biological systems into their constituent parts has been effective in explaining the chemical basis of numerous living processes. However, many biologists now realize that this approach has reached its limit. Biological systems are extremely complex and have emergent properties that cannot be explained, or even predicted, by studying their individual parts. The reductionist approach — although successful in the early days of molecular biology — underestimates this complexity and therefore has an increasingly detrimental influence on many areas of biomedical research, including drug discovery and vaccine development.
The claim made by Francis Crick (1966) that “The ultimate aim of the modern movement in biology is to explain all biology in terms of physics and chemistry” epitomizes the reductionist mindset that has pervaded molecular biology for half a century. The theory is that because biological systems are composed solely of atoms and molecules, without the influence of ‘alien’ or ‘spiritual’ forces, it should be possible to explain them using the physicochemical properties of their individual components, down to the atomic level. The most extreme manifestation of the reductionist view is the belief that is held by some neuroscientists that consciousness and mental states can be reduced to chemical reactions that occur in the brain (Bickle, 2003; Van Regenmortel, 2004).”
Clearly if we want to make progress with the problem of how to describe life scientifically a new approach is necessary.
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To progress any further there is going to have to be a reconsideration of the very axioms that the scientific edifice was built upon, which is not going to be so easy to repair without a demolition of the structure.
I don't think its quite as bad as you imagine. I have written a rational scheme. or theory, that can explain evolution and it will be published in a peer reviewed physics journal called Physics Essays. ISCID has agreed to archive it but since they haven't done so yet you can find it at web page
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William Brookfield
Member
Member # 565
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posted 17. October 2006 13:23
Hi John,
I am glad to see you are still following this thread. I am also glad to see that your papers are once again up at Uncommon Descent. The quote was from an exchange between you and Mel on page 12 of this thread..
Melvin H. Fox -- posted 22. September 2006 07:45 quote:
I don’t see the 2nd law of thermodynamics as preventing the natural (evolutionary) development of local complexities, however, inanimate material is a slave to the 2nd law by necessity while “life is a fugitive from the 2nd law” (quoting John Avery from his book) “
John A. Davison posted 24. September 2006 02:18
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Thermodynamics is a science and when the efficiencies of biological processes are in the 80% range which they most definitely are, living sysems are'nt "fleeing the second law."
To me this exchange (and subsequent related posts) suggests that a "bottom up" (reductionist) approach will not work here and that a "top down" approach is required.
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perplexity
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Member # 2675
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posted 17. October 2006 14:39
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.... invented to satisfy someone's need to categorize things. Perhaps it comes from the belief that if we label something with a fancy name then we understand it. ...Bohr thought ["complementarity"] up to explain something he didn't understand.
This is reductionist religion. Instead of naming one big god as if the explain the origin of the Universe, they name lots of tiny gods as if to explain the origin of categorized parts of it.
-- RH.
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Christopher D. Beling
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Member # 723
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posted 17. October 2006 20:54
William and perplexity - I am as much against reductionism as you are; however I dont see the subject of entropy cofigurational or otherwise as having to do with reductionism. To me its kind of the opposite. Surely its statistical basis deals with our inability to reduce (i.e. to an all particle coordinate description)?
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Configurational entropy does not appear in any physics books that I know of.
Try looking in Mystery of Life's Origin by Thaxton, Bradley and Olsen (p132 -p138). However this "configurational entropy" seems to be commensurate with what we now call CSI - so the term probably is outdated and this may be why you haven't seen it.
Perplexity:
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I think it was invented to satisfy someone's need to categorize things. Perhaps it comes from the belief that if we label something with a fancy name then we understand it.
Although the name of "configuration entropy" may have changed - it does not mean that it was not a good name and was not introduced for a good reason - Actually reading that section in Thaxton et.al. s book will show its thermodynamic importance. The reason is that the total Omega space of a system containing an information bearing molecule (i.e. DNA) is a product of the thermal and the configurational omega spaces. This means that the Shannon entropies (envelopes of possibilities) of the two will add. While the coupling between the two entropies is usually low it is not zero. This, I believe, is where the 4th law comes in. I will try and put more meat on this when I have more time - Chris
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perplexity
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Member # 2675
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posted 18. October 2006 03:38
Curiously, however, we find this, from Richard Oldani's paper quote:
....the most convincing evidence for this theory; which is claimed to
be the only one in existence based upon physical principles and bottom-up logic.
Before shooting off on too much of a reductionist tangent then, I suggest to review that actual claim.
I am not conversant with "the total Omega space" etc. but shall attempt to get to grips. Intuitively, this appears to be as philosphically profound as investigative science has yet been before.
-- RH.
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Richard Oldani
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posted 18. October 2006 23:05
A few comments that come to mind:
Configurational entropy and CSI, Complex Specified Information, do not have a statistical basis. They are biological thermodynamic terms which is why they do not appear in physics books and are not defined as strictly as in physical thermodynamics. Similarly, you may have noticed that the referee who critiqued my paper did not require my arguments to be in strict conformance with physical laws as would normally be true for a paper on physics. This is because the life sciences cannot be verified as precisely.
The authors of "The Mystery of Life's Origins" did not intend configurational entropy to be used as an exact physical variable. This is clear in Chapter 9 when they repeatedly point out that there must be a coupling mechanism between energy flow and the configurational entropy, but its nature and magnitude are a mystery. Thus configurational entropy and similar terms are able to serve a useful purpose in biological discussions. In my paper I have defined the coupling mechanism to be quantization.
We would expect complex systems such as life forms to be constructed from the bottom up, i.e. starting with simple components. Darwin's theory, on the other hand, starts with complex life forms and by means of natural selection modifies the genome. This is clearly a top down process.
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William Brookfield
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Member # 565
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posted 19. October 2006 19:39
Hi Richard & Perplexity,
I guess I should have clarified what I mean by "top down" and "bottom up."
At the "top" I have placed MIND meaning and information (negentropy).
At the "bottom" I place meaningless dead MATTER and black hole entropy.
The emergence of bacteria and flagella is IN NO WAY predicted (even statistically) by material black hole dynamics or thermodynamics. Attempting to explain Beethoven's 9th symphony in terms of elementary particle energies and collisions, is what I would call a futile bottom up "explanation."
"Top down" means that we get to address the phenomenon at the level at which it exists. Subnaturalist orthodox science disallows any consideration of the flagella at its natural level. Natural Selective destruction (NS) and RM (a randomizing/scrambling function applied to genetic information) are supposed to provide a scientific reductionist (bottom up) explanation for the flagella et al. Given that both NS(d) and Randomization (RM) are destruction functions, this is the epitome of reductionist "bottom up" nonsense. The flagella is a biological construction(+) not a biological destruction(-). A construction function is required.
While I reject Weinbergian/Dawkinian subnaturalism, otherwise known as "Materialist Reductionism" (pointless universe/pointless supercolliders/pointless God-delusion-books etc,.) I do embrace Explanatory Reductionism. Materialist Reductionism and Explanatory Reductionism are two different things and are often confused.
The cosmos (in my model) is produced by an Iterating God-function. Just as with say the Mandelbrot set, the set-up and initial cycles (of projection and re-introduction) are simple. With each subsequent hyper-cycle, god-complexity and projection-complexity (creation complexity) increases. As a novelty-seeking function, complexity and functional specificity accrue naturally. Because my model begins simple and becomes more complex over time it could be called a "reductionist" model -- but only in a nice way ![[Smile]](smile.gif) This is because the evolving God-mind (the "top") is always propelling and evolving the cosmos. Dead matter (the "bottom") never propels anything.
Richard
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Darwin's theory, on the other hand, starts with complex life forms and by means of natural selection modifies the genome.
I would say "Darwin's theory starts with semi-complex life forms and by means of natural selective destruction, destructively filters the genetic library to leave the remaining.....even more complex life forms?!
Richard
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This is clearly a top down process.
Yes indeed, but it is being portrayed by Darwinists as a "bottom up" theory in terms of Explanatory Reductionism (from simple {bottom} life forms to more complex{top}life forms) It is also being portrayed as a "bottom up" solution in terms of materialist reductionism (I.E. that it all happens by material processes only). While I support "explanatory reductionism" materialist sub-naturalist reductionism is a discredited and unnecessarily limiting core hypothesis-turned-ideology.
Chris,
I have yet to find the "Mystery of Life's Origin" book so I may not be able to respond coherently to the question of configuration entropy. I did however recently find a link to three chapters at this web page (just in case there are others like me who can't find the book). Unfortunately there are no page numbers beyond the chapter headings. Your comments on this are very interesting but I am not quite sure how to respond to them yet.
Chris,
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Surely its statistical basis deals with our inability to reduce (i.e. to an all particle coordinate description)?
I personally see statistical mechanics as a good working tool for the analysis of thermodynamics and information theory, but there is a problem here. A statistical law is an uncertain law and "uncertain law" is a contradiction in terms. Statistically speaking, the 2nd "law" works because of overwhelming probability, not certainty. Historically, Henri Poincare was aware of this problem and produced "Poincare's Recurrence" representing the statistical possibility of the 2nd law going awry. I am convinced however that the 2nd law is a real law and that the statistical formulation is problematic. The solution I believe is to frame the 2nd law(s) in terms of an underlying continuously variable infodynamic relativistic topology. Easier said than done perhaps but I figure we're up to it.
Richard.
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Configurational entropy and CSI, Complex Specified Information, do not have a statistical basis.
I don't understand this given the context. It seems to me that CSI is being formulated statistically (in terms of probability {UPB}) at this time.
[ 19. October 2006, 19:50: Message edited by: William Brookfield ]
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Christopher D. Beling
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Member # 723
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posted 19. October 2006 22:07
Omega space may sound metaphysical - and must not be in anyway confused with the highly speculative and metaphysical "Omega point" of Barrow and Tippler!. Indeed I believe it is a very real and helpful scientific quantity. This can be seen from the above diagrams, which follow the works of Bill Dembski (NFL -ch3) - and Thaxton et al (Mystery of Life's Origin, ch 8 = website given by William in previous post) and an updated version of the same by of ch8 by Walter Bradley ( Debating Design , ch 18).
Every code has an alphabet. In the case of proteins there is the 20 amino acids (AAs) alphabet. The diagram on the right is my artists impression! of protein omega space. It shows the first 4 AAs only out of a string of length N - (One can only visualize a 3 dimensions out of the N - here visualization of 4 is attempted). I have taken the AA alphabet as the English alphabet with vowels and letter Z missing - giving a protein alphabet of 20. Taking B=1, C=2 etc gives the configuration N-W-H-R-..). Omega is thus the full space of possible string configurations. This "envelope of possibilities" has a Shannon entropy = Configuration Entropy of
where Omega1 is the range of possibilities for a single AA - i.e. 20. Omega is usually very big. Take a protein polymer: The number of possible outcomes is 20^N. If the probability of each AA occuring is 1/20=0.05 then log2(Omega1)=log2(20)=4.32bits and the configuration entropy for the protein is 4.32xN bits.
Following Walter Bradley in "debating design" ch 18, consider the cytochrome c protein which has N=110. The Configuration Entropy of the string is 110x4.32=475 bits. But since the AAs are not equally probable the Shannon Information per AA falls to 4.14bits. Thus for cytochrome c the full Configuration Entropy is 455bits.
The diagram on the left is taken from Bill Dembski's "No Free Lunch" p139 - also from Sal's posting (June 10th 2005, page 5). It represents the N-dimensional polymer space as an Omega space of 2-dimensions (to make visualization simple). From Bill's diagram an important relationship derives, namely that the CSInformation of a functional protein is given by:
where Hfc is the Shannon Information of the functional code. The above equation is not new - it may be found in Mystery of Life's Origin page 132 equation 8-3b, and in a slightly different form as equation 18-11 in Debating Design. Hfc may be referred to as Functional Entropy or the Coding Entropy , or the Informed Configuration Entropy or the Genetic Entropy. Whatever one may call it, it is the entropy [envelope of possibilities] of only those configurations that give function in the target region. Yockey gives Hfc for cytochrome c as 310 bits. The above equation then gives the CS Information content of cytochrome c as 455-310 = 145 bits.
The above equation gives an important inverse relationship between CS Information and functional entropy Hfc. If it is supposed that Hfc is continually on the increase ?? (2nd law) this equation implies that CSI must be on the decrease (4th law #1).- Chris
[ 20. October 2006, 20:56: Message edited by: Christopher D. Beling ]
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