Goodbye Religion, Hello Second Law!
When I thought of
the Second Law of Thermodynamics, I (obviously) thought of it as an engineer
(disorder, entropy, blah blah). But no more. Thanks to this amusing and profound
take by Steven Pinker, a non-science guy, who listed that very law as the
scientific term/concept that deserves to be known widely!
So what makes the
Second Law worth knowing? Pinker points out the psychological benefits of knowing this law!
“The Second Law defines the ultimate
purpose of life, mind, and human striving: to deploy energy and information to
fight back the tide of entropy and carve out refuges of beneficial order. An
underappreciation of the inherent tendency toward disorder, and a failure to
appreciate the precious niches of order we carve out, are a major source of
human folly.”
The Second Law
answers or rather, flips the why-poverty question on its head:
“Poverty, too, needs no explanation. In a
world governed by entropy and evolution, it is the default state of humankind.
Matter does not just arrange itself into shelter or clothing, and living things
do everything they can not to become our food. What needs to be explained is wealth. Yet
most discussions of poverty consist of arguments about whom to blame for it.”
Goodbye Religion,
hello Second Law!
And it also offers
this gem to help us deal with our frustrations:
“An underappreciation of the Second Law
lures people into seeing every unsolved social problem as a sign that their
country is being driven off a cliff. It’s in the very nature of the universe
that life has problems. But it’s better to figure out how to solve them—to
apply information and energy to expand our refuge of beneficial order—than to
start a conflagration and hope for the best.”
And yet,
ironically, for a concept that Pinker says should be known more widely, he
points out the many colloquial versions of the Second Law that people use all
the time, probably unknowingly!
““Ashes to ashes,” “Things fall apart,”
“Rust never sleeps,” “Shit happens,” “You can’t unscramble an egg,” “What can
go wrong will go wrong,” and (from the Texas lawmaker Sam Rayburn), “Any
jackass can kick down a barn, but it takes a carpenter to build one.”
I always knew that
the Second Law was one of the core principles to our understanding of the
physical universe; but I never realized that it could also be a good philosophy for going through life! Boy,
there are so many layers to that law…
I am inclined to believe that "extending a law of physics, which happens to suggest the inexorable movement towards lesser order, into some generalized abstraction in some distant domain of human life and all" is something that would induce a frown on the great physicist Richard Feynman's face! I recall when people tried to express this idea that "our paradigms/points-of-view are all relative" is a parallel to the theory of relativity, it attracted criticism. The physicists pointed out that such implications have no place and the relativity of physics in Einstein's proposal. Relativity is about the implication of relative speeds between high velocity "things" for one thing, while competing with light, and, subsequently about shrinkages of length and time in the domain involving relative velocities. Bringing the theory of relativity into vague phycology was looked upon by the scientists as silly extrapolation of one domain into irrelevant domains.
ReplyDeleteI would consider a similar possibility here too. If scientists feel, "who are philosophers or religious people to define and discuss physical laws of nature", the same thing has potential to boomerang on protagonists who try to push science musings into generalized philosophy, as if it is actually sanctioned by science. "How inappropriate of scientists (or people who take up ideas from physics) to cloth them into philosophy? Is it their domain at all?"
I am not saying science is devoid of philosophical content or profound implications. When Schrödinger discusses the way the formation of life (putting together of giant molecules and building wholesome organisms)happens there is a "thermodynamical dilemma" because the question why specific or limited choices are hit upon from among immense and disorderly possibilities, is a surprise to him who knows physics better than us all. I can appreciate such things no doubt.
I also appreciate people like Immanual Kant, who did rational analysis not amounting to exact physical science deductions. He was a fantastic philosopher who could make us understand how it is impossible to arrive at "conduct regulations" or "right behavior" for humans, no matter how one might try with the method of logic and reason. There I appreciate his honesty because the Western philosophers were indeed sincere in their attempt to understand ethics through reasoning, while not agreeing to moral dogmas.
Can vague extrapolations of science philosophies such as the implication of the second law of thermodynamics actually amount to good philosophy indeed? I have my doubts. But then, I do always encourage open-mindedness and inter-disciplinary musings. In that sense I am not condemning mindlessly either. I only stress on the need to go to real fundamentals and never let go of truth and objectivity, whatever be the attempt/direction.