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Comment by pmarreck | Hacker News Reader

> This may be nihilism, but at least it's good-humored.

Whiffed on the fact that humor itself here is meaning. Explaining away positive experiences as "illusory" (which is, without evidence that it IS in fact "illusory" instead of just being conjecture based on currently-known facts, simply "gaslighting" to me), is the problem of nihilism (IMHO).

Anyone ever consider the odd fact that every nonliving thing in the universe always tends toward higher entropy, but living things take this weird (and unexplained, thus far, to me) detour into lower entropy/higher organization, at least for a time (until death permits entropy to take over again)? That to me is particularly peculiar, and seems to fly in the face of materialist arguments that basically equate life to "non-life, but with more steps".

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>living things take this weird detour into lower entropy

Take a look at “Into the Cool” by Eric Schneider and Dorian Sagan. It’s about as academic as it can be while remaining accessible. It’s basic premise builds off of the truism that “nature abhors a gradient” and attempts to lay out a theory that the gradient of solar energy falling on the planet (along with a plethora of other rarer factors) generated higher-complexity constructs as a way to absorb and reduce that gradient. There are plenty of non-living phenomena in nature which are subtly very organized but which result in net increases in entropy in the longer term. One of the examples described in the book are a kind of voronoi cell pattern that emerges when heating a thin layer of oil which succeeds in reducing the temperature gradient very effectively. Even if it isn’t a hard hitting proof of the abiogenetic mechanism it is still a very interesting read.

oh wow, this DOES look fascinating. Thanks!

Other places to start reading about entropy in biology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autopoiesis https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01318-z

You reminded me of this old article: "A New Physics Theory of Life" https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-new-thermodynamics-theory-o...

I've always thought of biological life as being the macroscopic analog of enzymes. We're literally big balls of protein catalyzing reactions and overcoming activation energies to accelerate the heat death of the universe.

One example of non-living matter tending towards lower entropy is the formation of mineral crystals in void spaces in rocks. This does require a high-energy input, i.e. heated water dissolving large volumes of silica which later slowly crystallize. The entropy of the silicon and oxygen atoms in the quartz crystal is lower than that in the dissolved aqueous state.

Similar effects are postulated to be involved in the origin of life, with energy sources like oceanic hydrothermal vents providing the energy sources driving the synthesis of complex organic molecules which eventually developed the capability of self-replication, aka decreasing randomness, increasing order, lowering local entropy.

A mechanistic 'non-living' model of life, entropy-wise, could be a waterwheel driven by a river (of sunlight and geothermal energy) which operates a sawmill, a steel mill, a chip fab, a robot factory, a paper mill and a printing press - with each generation of robots building more waterwheel-based units based on the instructions (DNA) provided by the printing press. This all relies on a robust source of energy, since the Gibbs equation (dg = dh - tds) says that for a process to move forward, the energy release (dh) must be greater than the entropy reduction (tds) that it is coupled to. Such a system meets all mechanistic definitions of life without being alive... a philosophical conundrum I suppose.

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