Thanks for that comment, I very much enjoy these topics.
“Agency is only possible if the system’s capacities are structured so as to carve up its environment in this manner.”
Why would we not be able to accurately describe and process the occasional phenomenon that went counter to the Second Law?
Intermittent decreases in entropy might even make the evolution of complex brains more likely, at least it does not make the existence of agents such as us less likely prima facie. If you want to rely on the Anthropic Principle, you’d need to establish why it would prefer such strict adherence to the Second Law.
Are you familiar with Smolin’s paper on the AP? “It is explained in detail why the Anthropic Principle (AP) cannot yield any falsifiable predictions, and therefore cannot be a part of science.” For a rebuttal see the Smolin Susskind dialogue here.
Even if there were a case to be made that agency would only be possible if the partition generally follows the Second Law, it would be outright unexpected for the partition to follow it as strictly as we assume it does.
Out of the myriad trajectories through phase space, why would the one perfectly (in the sense of as yet unfalsified) mimicking the Second Law be taken? There could surely exist agencies if there were just a general, or even very close, correspondence. Which would be vastly more likely for us to observe, if we were iid chosen from all such worlds with agency (self sampling assumption).
I am familiar with Smolin’s objections, but I don’t buy them. His argument hinges on accepting an outmoded Popperian philosophy of science. I don’t think it holds if one adopts a properly Bayesian perspective. In any case, I think my particular form of anthropic argument counts as a selection effect within one world, a form of argument to which even he doesn’t object.
As for the ubiquity of Second Law-obeying systems, I admit it is something I have thought about and it does worry me a little. I don’t have a fully worked response, but here’s a tentative answer: If there were the occasional spontaneously entropy decreasing macroscopic system in our environment, the entropy decrease would be very difficult to corral. As long as such a system could interact with other systems, we could use it to extract work from those other systems as well. And, as I said, if most of the systems in our environment were not Second Law-obeying, then we could not exercise our agency by learning about them and acting on them based on what we learn. So perhaps there’s a kind of instability to the situation where a few systems don’t obey the Second Law while the rest do that explains why this is not the situation we’re in.
Thanks for that comment, I very much enjoy these topics.
Why would we not be able to accurately describe and process the occasional phenomenon that went counter to the Second Law?
Intermittent decreases in entropy might even make the evolution of complex brains more likely, at least it does not make the existence of agents such as us less likely prima facie. If you want to rely on the Anthropic Principle, you’d need to establish why it would prefer such strict adherence to the Second Law.
Are you familiar with Smolin’s paper on the AP? “It is explained in detail why the Anthropic Principle (AP) cannot yield any falsifiable predictions, and therefore cannot be a part of science.” For a rebuttal see the Smolin Susskind dialogue here.
Even if there were a case to be made that agency would only be possible if the partition generally follows the Second Law, it would be outright unexpected for the partition to follow it as strictly as we assume it does.
Out of the myriad trajectories through phase space, why would the one perfectly (in the sense of as yet unfalsified) mimicking the Second Law be taken? There could surely exist agencies if there were just a general, or even very close, correspondence. Which would be vastly more likely for us to observe, if we were iid chosen from all such worlds with agency (self sampling assumption).
I am familiar with Smolin’s objections, but I don’t buy them. His argument hinges on accepting an outmoded Popperian philosophy of science. I don’t think it holds if one adopts a properly Bayesian perspective. In any case, I think my particular form of anthropic argument counts as a selection effect within one world, a form of argument to which even he doesn’t object.
As for the ubiquity of Second Law-obeying systems, I admit it is something I have thought about and it does worry me a little. I don’t have a fully worked response, but here’s a tentative answer: If there were the occasional spontaneously entropy decreasing macroscopic system in our environment, the entropy decrease would be very difficult to corral. As long as such a system could interact with other systems, we could use it to extract work from those other systems as well. And, as I said, if most of the systems in our environment were not Second Law-obeying, then we could not exercise our agency by learning about them and acting on them based on what we learn. So perhaps there’s a kind of instability to the situation where a few systems don’t obey the Second Law while the rest do that explains why this is not the situation we’re in.