The usual materialist story of life I’ve heard is that life acts like an entropy pump, creating local reductions of entropy within the organism but increasing the entropy outside of the organism. (I think I’ve even seen that in The Sequences somewhere? But couldn’t find it, feel encouraged to link it.) But I’ve come to think that might actually be wrong and life might increase entropy both inside and outside the organism.
Here’s a rough account:
We ought to expect entropy to increase, so a priori life is much more feasible if it increases entropy rather than decreasing entropy.
Living matter is built mainly out of carbon and hydrogen, which is extracted from CO2 and H2O, leaving O2 as a result. Entropy breakdown:
The O2 left over from breaking up CO2 ought to have somewhat lower entropy than the original CO2.
The O2 left over from breaking up the original H2O ought to have… higher entropy because it’s a gas now?
The hydrocarbons don’t have much entropy because they stick together into big chunks that therefore heavily constrain their DOFs, but they do have some entropy for various reasons, and they are much more tightly packed than air, so per volume they oughta have orders of magnitude more entropy density. (Claude estimates around 200x.)
Organic matter also traps a lot of water which has a high entropy density.
Usually you don’t talk about entropy density rather than absolute entropy, but it’s unclear to me what it means for organisms to “locally” increase/decrease entropy if not by density.
Oxygen + hydrocarbons = lots of free energy, while water + carbon dioxide = not so much free energy. We usually associate free energy with low entropy, but that’s relative to the burned state where the free energy has been released into thermal energy. In this case, we should instead think relative to an unlit state where the energy hasn’t been collected at all. Less energy generally correlates to lower entropy.
[Question] Does life actually locally *increase* entropy?
The usual materialist story of life I’ve heard is that life acts like an entropy pump, creating local reductions of entropy within the organism but increasing the entropy outside of the organism. (I think I’ve even seen that in The Sequences somewhere? But couldn’t find it, feel encouraged to link it.) But I’ve come to think that might actually be wrong and life might increase entropy both inside and outside the organism.
Here’s a rough account:
We ought to expect entropy to increase, so a priori life is much more feasible if it increases entropy rather than decreasing entropy.
Living matter is built mainly out of carbon and hydrogen, which is extracted from CO2 and H2O, leaving O2 as a result. Entropy breakdown:
The O2 left over from breaking up CO2 ought to have somewhat lower entropy than the original CO2.
The O2 left over from breaking up the original H2O ought to have… higher entropy because it’s a gas now?
The hydrocarbons don’t have much entropy because they stick together into big chunks that therefore heavily constrain their DOFs, but they do have some entropy for various reasons, and they are much more tightly packed than air, so per volume they oughta have orders of magnitude more entropy density. (Claude estimates around 200x.)
Organic matter also traps a lot of water which has a high entropy density.
Usually you don’t talk about entropy density rather than absolute entropy, but it’s unclear to me what it means for organisms to “locally” increase/decrease entropy if not by density.
Oxygen + hydrocarbons = lots of free energy, while water + carbon dioxide = not so much free energy. We usually associate free energy with low entropy, but that’s relative to the burned state where the free energy has been released into thermal energy. In this case, we should instead think relative to an unlit state where the energy hasn’t been collected at all. Less energy generally correlates to lower entropy.
Am I missing something?