I can sense early spring here in Boston. I see some shoots springing and the beginning of the chirps of birds. I read somewhere that as birds migrate south during winter and north during the summer in North America, that the order of the birds arriving north is perhaps by species. In this regard, the first birds to Boston in the spring are the red-winged black birds.
Then other birds follow. I imagine that folks who have been to the Serengeti in Africa have seen something like this in the animal migration there.
In any case, to get an early start for this spring, in our backyard we are having a landscaper dig up a lot of vines that had grown over many years. I tried to do this manually last year. What took me two months, the landscapers were able to work more of the area in two days. In fact, I am fondly looking at a small earth moving machine in our backyard - wishing I could drive it around! vroom vrooom.
As I watched the leaves and vines were being dug up, I wondered how 30 years of untended wild growth is being ripped apart.
Clearly there is a sequence of priority here from the smallest organism to the most complex. We are highest it seems, on this totem pole. When I raised this question to a friend twenty years ago, I was summarily dismissed for even thinking that. I did not pursue it further. But that does not mean the question is not lurking at the back of my mind all the time. There are rules that govern us in human affairs. Everything else, be it life or matter - is for us to do with as we please (it seems like).
This leads me to a fundamental question, 'What is Life?'. There are many angles to this - scientific, philosophical, artistic and spiritual. But it is indeed fascinating to think that a teeny tiny single cell is just as alive as we are - and even more fascinating to think about all the variety and diversity that life has produced.
The seminal work 'What is Life' was written by Erwin Schrodinger which is an anthology of a series of lectures he provided in Ireland to be accessible to the lay person. In that he proposed the idea of an 'aperiodic crystal.' Indeed, both Watson and Crick credit this as their inspiration to further study the DNA and identify the double helix structure.
Being a physicist, Schrodinger wondered how when the entire universe experiences entropy (increasing disorder), life exhibits its reverse (more order)? And has a very interesting conclusion:
In a world governed by the second law of thermodynamics, all closed systems are expected to approach a state of maximum disorder. In contrast, life approaches and maintains a highly ordered state - which seems to violate the second law of thermodynamics. The solution to this paradox is that life is not a closed system. The increase of order inside an organism is more than paid for by an increase in disorder outside this organism. By this mechanism, the second law is obeyed, and life maintains a high order state, which it sustains by causing a net increase in disorder in the Universe.
We have debated many times on the nature of identity and the nature of consciousness. But it is interesting to ask, what is this life itself, that then leads to evolving levels of complex consciousness?
With every act of human design, we are creating order. A beautiful house. A painting. A poem. It seems to me, that to balance out, disorder is created elsewhere in the universe.
We are at our home, trying to create order in our back yard this spring. It is (apparently) creating disorder elsewhere (dumping grounds, broken up nests and so on).
It surely motivates one to want to be Zen - and just go with the flow of the universe.....!
6 comments:
Boy! Am I glad you ended it the way you did!
My personal take..
DNA is in the realm of thought. fascination with the order in nature is in the realm of thought. The understanding of life at the realm of the thought will always leave a residue. Right now, let me paraphrase:
What gives humans and hence our DNA its unique properties?
Today, with your erudition, you may answer.. "simple it is in the sequence ABX-XYRRA- (beg pardon)"
This answer begs another question and a new residue R' as it were.. the mind can always ask more questions than contemporary science can answer
Interesting questions of this sort are the reason that the human race continues to think that everything in the universe is created for it to enjoy.
That causes the entropy increase in the universe. Erwin Schroedinger is an enigma to me when it comes to his personal life despite his great contributions to science and his admiration for The Vedas and Upanishads. Raman offered him a professorship at I I Sc, but he chose to go to Dublin.
The question that we need to ask in discussing entropy is what is universe?
If it us expanding at ever increasing speeds as it gets bigger, surely entropy increase has plenty of room and the question of thermodynamic reversibility (with ds = 0) remains may be an abstract ideal only.
Life is full of conflicts of interests:
1. Every time we create a solution for a problem, we create numerous other problems. Human race made sure that we will never run of problems to solve. Good for the economy and bad for the environment.
2. If we choose to live better year after year, what we define as progress, the path to problem creation is a freeway for all.
3. Living simply and overcoming desires/wants has been preached by our Rishii community. Do you know of any modern Swamiji, who lives simply and follows this path? The exception as far as I know was Ramana Maharishi.
4. John Ruskin said "if you want to be rich, keep your neighbors poor". Of the 7 billion people in the world, how many eat a square meal a day?
5. Gandhi said, we should consume and seek less, not more as we move in time? Are there any serious takers for that idea? I confess I ceased to be one of them a long time ago. Strange as it may sound, Investment wizard, Warren Buffet, the Oracle of Omaha as they call him, is probably one of them if all that I read about his continued simple living is true, which I believe it is. Buffet is giving it all anyway to charities.
6. Human activity certainly leads to destruction. Human beings do not know how to live and respect one another. Is it creationism or is it evolution that is responsible for this human trait? Or is it religion or lack there of? Does any one carry his power, money, or other possessions with him at death? What explains the actions of the dictators of the world to kill their own innocent people to stay in power? Did God create them like that or they evolved that way? Or other forces are at play?
7. Now we must surely ask ourselves "are we the highest" ( in what? I assume in evolution!!! into a more intelligent creature)) in light of all the destruction that mankind causes in the world.
That brings us back to the question of "what is Life?" That leads us to ask "why are we here?"
I suffer from the weakness of going back to Adi Sankara and his illusion/Maya principle whenever such questions trouble me. Let me repeat that one of his students asked him that if all this is Maya what use is all his teaching to them? Sankara responded: imagine you are in a dream and suddenly you came face to face with darkness? If I bring a REAL lamp to your bed side, would it help eliminate the darkness you had in your dream? No - but if I were to bring an illusory lamp into your dream that would quell your darkness, is it not? Similarly my Maya or illusory teachings also are intended to remove the darkness of unreality or Maya you are in.
This sounds too philosophical you might say. Yes indeed - many of these troubling questions - I am afraid will remain so.
From what little you say about your friend’s reaction to your notion of species hierarchy, I suspect he’s a Peter Singer fan and that he was shocked by your bald-faced ‘speciesism’.
What’s that? (From Intellectual Morons; How Ideology Makes Smart People Fall for Stupid Ideas by Daniel J. Flynn; the chapter about Singer titled “Speciesism”):
Central to his argument is the notion of “speciesism,” a form of discrimination towards animals that he equates with racism, sexism, and various other forms of oppression. At first glance, the term Singer has coined might seem to be a parody of political correctness. It is not. The professor is deadly serious. “Speciesism – the word is not an attractive one, but I can think of no better term – is a prejudice or attitude of bias in favor of the interests of members of one’s own species and against those of members of other species,” he writes in Animal Liberation, the animal rights movement’s seminal work.
And, apropos the subtitle of his book, Mr. Flynn explains the attraction of such silliness:
Many enamored with the fight against racism, sexism, classism, ableism, ageism, and sizeism have welcomed the opportunity to add another category of oppression to fight against. Others have concluded that comparing blacks and women to animals is degrading.
But that last charge didn’t cause even so much as a blush on Mr. Singer’s face:
And if your ‘loon’ warning light isn’t yet blinking wildly, this excerpt from Flynn just might do it:
While eating animals is strictly off-limits in Singer’s ideal world, having sex with them is not. In an article in a dark corner of the Internet, Singer graphically describes an octopus performing sex acts upon a woman. Elsewhere in the piece he details men engaging in the marital act with barnyard hens. Of this latter practice, the Ivy League prof proclaimed, “But is it worse for the hen than living for a year or more crowded with four or five other hens in [a] barren wire cage so small that they can never stretch their wings, and then being stuffed into crates to be taken to the slaughterhouse, strung upside down on a conveyor belt and killed?”
Well, I’m sure it’s crossed your mind, as it does others not blinded by ideology (“Singer’s ideology is a mélange of animal-rights activism, environmentalism, and Marxism….”), that you can be in favor of bettering the existence of farm animals without all the other nonsense Singer brings to the cause. But it does serve to demonstrate where the ideological primacy of egalitarianism over all other human values leads you. What’s next, Moleculism? Atomism? Quarkism?
In fact, perhaps this the right time for me to call you out regarding your bigoted preference for the ‘up quark’ over the ‘down quark’! I think you need to closely examine what’s behind your rabid ‘upism’! And then publicly apologize for this wrongful thinking while wearing a sandwich board clearly labeling you an upist and an enemy of the down quark. Oh, and a dunce cap too.
Madness. Let’s hope that your friend has grown out of such silliness. And if not, that he doesn’t hold a position of responsibility greater than that of asking “Do you want fries with that?”
It has long been suggested that self-organized systems do not just level out energy gradients more quickly than disordered ones do, they do it as quickly as possible. … Bejan’s constructal law states that for a flow system to persist (i.e., live), it must over time provide easier access to the currents that flow through it – it must come to do more with less, in other words. In the process, it minimizes the amount of fuel used and maximizes the amount of entropy for each unit of fuel burnt.
Said differently, my Zen flow is all about speeding up entropy in the cosmos, dude! And I’m at the top of the species hierarchy because I do it more efficiently than any other species – as a quick look around my place and the world at large will attest.
Shhhhh, please don’t tell Singer and his enviro buddies…. ‘Cause there’d be hell to pay!
;-)
I was reading your essay and thought about the birds of spring. One particular bird comes to mind....the Bar-tailed Godwit. This bird is nothing extraordinary to look at. In fact it is down right bland.
However, it is the only bird that flies 7000 miles non-stop and in the process losses half its body weight. It is called the toughest bird on earth. I heard about this bird on NPR once.
It sure is inspirational at the very least to read about it.
Here is the link:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2011/09/14/140467059/the-toughest-little-bird-youve-never-heard-of
Awesome! excellent pictures of the bird and backyard - that machine definitely would be fun to drive!
I always enjoy these. Along with sparking an idea or concept to think about that I hadn't given much thought to previously / recently - I always learn about various authors, theorists, philosophers etc.
I assume that is the Schrodinger who has the equation named after him in the physics world... I'd love to check out his book.
A hot subject with an entropy angle!
In terms of number of people on earth, it has grown four fold in one century. Therefore, even though individual life approaches increasing order, in totality it is highly probable there will be a net increase in disorder! Hope Schrodinger and others would condone me for this irreverent simpleton comment!!
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