Imperfect Persistence of Metabolically Active Engines
All things rot. Indidivual organisms, societies-at-large, businesses, churches, empires and maritime republics, man-made artifacts of glass and steel, creatures of flesh and blood.
Conjecture #1 There is a lower bound on the amount of dissipation / rot that any metabolically-active engine creates.
Conjecture #2 Metabolic Rot of an engine is proportional to (1) size and complexity of the engine and (2) amount of metabolism the engine engages in.
The larger and more complex the are the more the engine they rot. The more metabolism.
Corollary Metabolic Rot imposes a limit on the lifespan & persistence of any engine at any given level of imperfect persistence.
Let me call this constellation of conjectured rules, the Law of Metabolic Rot. I conjecture that the correct formulation of the Law of Metabolic Rot will be a highly elaborate version of the Second Law of thermodynamics in nonequilibrium dynamics, see above links for some suggested directions.
Example. A rock is both simple and inert. This model correctly predicts that rocks persist for a long time.
Example. Cars, aircraft, engines of war and other man-made machines engaged in ‘metabolism’. These are complex engines
A rocket engine is more metabolically active than a jet engine is more metabolically active than a car engine. [at least in this case] The lifespan of different types of engines seems (roughly) inversely proportional to how metabolically active.
To make a good comparison one should exclude external repair mechanisms. If one would allow external repair mechanism it’s unclear where to draw a principled line—we’d get into Ship of Theseus problems.
Example. Bacteria in ice. Bacteria frozen in Antarctic ice for millions of years happily go on eating and reproducing when unfrozen.
Example. The phenotype & genotype of a biological species over time. We call this evolution. cf. four fundamental forces of evolution: mutation, drift, selection, and recombination [sex].
What is Metabolism ?
With metabolism, I mean metabolism as commonly understood as extracting energy from food particles and utilizing said energy for movement, reproduction, homeostasis etc but also a general phenomenon of interacting and manipulating free energy levers of the environement.
Thermodynamics as commonly understood applies to physical systems with energy and temperature.
Instead, I think it’s better to think of thermodynamics as a set of tools describing the behaviour of certain Natural Abstractions under a dynamical transformation.
cf. the second law as the degradation of the predictive accuracy of a latent abstraction under a time- evolution operator.
The correct formulation will likely require a serious dive into Computational Mechanics.
What is Life?
In 1944 noted paedophile Schrodinger posted the book ‘What is Life’ suggesting that Life can be understood as a thermodynamics phenomenon that used a free-energy gradient to locally lower entropy. Speculation of ‘Life as a thermodynamic phenomenon’ is much older going back to the original pioneers of thermodynamics in the late 19th century.
I claim that this picture is insufficient. Thermodynamic highly dissipative structures distinct from bona fide life are myriad. Even ‘metabolically active, locally low entropy engines encased in a boundary in a thermodynamic free energy gradient’.
No, to truly understand life we need to understand reproduction, replication, evolution. To understand biological organisms what distinguishes from mere encased engines we need to zoom out to its entire lifecycle—and beyond. The vis vita, elan vital can only be understood through the soliton of the species.
To understand Life, we must understand Death
Cells are incredibly complex, metabolically active membrane-enclosed engines. The Law of Metabolic Rot applied naievely to a single metabolically active multi-celled eukaryote would preclude life-as-we-know-it to exist beyond a few hundred years. Any metabolically active large organism would simply pick up to much noise, errors over time to persist for anything like geological time-scales.
Error-correcting mechanisms/codes can help—but only so much. Perhaps even the diamonodoid magika of future superintelligence will hit the eternal laws of thermodynamics
Instead, through the magic of biological reproduction lifeforms imperfectly persist over the eons of geological time. Biological life is a singularly clever work-around of the Law of Metabolic Rot. Instead, of preserving and repairing the original organism—life has found another way. Mother Nature noisily compiles down the phenotype to a genetic blueprint. The original is chucked a way without a second thought. The old makes way for the new. The cycle of life is the Ship of Theseus writ large. The genetic blueprint, the genome, is (1) small (2) metabolically inactive.
In the end, the cosmic tax of Decay cannot be denied. Even Mother Nature must pays the bloodprice for the sin of metabolism. Her flora and fauna are exorably burdened by mutations, imperfections of the bloodline. Genetic drift drives children away their parents. To stay the course of imperfect persistence the She-Kybernetes must pay an ever higher price. Her children, mingling into manifold mongrels of aboriginal prototypes, huddling & recombining their pure genomes to stave away the deluge of errors. The bloodline grows weak. The genome crumbles. Tear-faced Mother Nature throws her babes into the jaws of the eternal tournament. Eat or be eaten. Nature, red in tooth and claw. Babes ripped from their mothers. Brother slays brother. Those not slain, is deceived. Those not deceived controlled. The prize? The simple fact of Existence. To imperfect persist one more day.
None of the original parts remain. The ship of Theseus sails on.
[see also Hanson on rot, generalizations of the second law to nonequilibrium systems (Baez-Pollard, Crutchfield et al.) ]
Imperfect Persistence of Metabolically Active Engines
All things rot. Indidivual organisms, societies-at-large, businesses, churches, empires and maritime republics, man-made artifacts of glass and steel, creatures of flesh and blood.
Conjecture #1 There is a lower bound on the amount of dissipation / rot that any metabolically-active engine creates.
Conjecture #2 Metabolic Rot of an engine is proportional to (1) size and complexity of the engine and (2) amount of metabolism the engine engages in.
The larger and more complex the are the more the engine they rot. The more metabolism.
Corollary Metabolic Rot imposes a limit on the lifespan & persistence of any engine at any given level of imperfect persistence.
Let me call this constellation of conjectured rules, the Law of Metabolic Rot. I conjecture that the correct formulation of the Law of Metabolic Rot will be a highly elaborate version of the Second Law of thermodynamics in nonequilibrium dynamics, see above links for some suggested directions.
Example. A rock is both simple and inert. This model correctly predicts that rocks persist for a long time.
Example. Cars, aircraft, engines of war and other man-made machines engaged in ‘metabolism’. These are complex engines
A rocket engine is more metabolically active than a jet engine is more metabolically active than a car engine. [at least in this case] The lifespan of different types of engines seems (roughly) inversely proportional to how metabolically active.
To make a good comparison one should exclude external repair mechanisms. If one would allow external repair mechanism it’s unclear where to draw a principled line—we’d get into Ship of Theseus problems.
Example. Bacteria.
cf. Bacteria replicate at thermodynamic limits?
Example. Bacteria in ice. Bacteria frozen in Antarctic ice for millions of years happily go on eating and reproducing when unfrozen.
Example. The phenotype & genotype of a biological species over time. We call this evolution. cf. four fundamental forces of evolution: mutation, drift, selection, and recombination [sex].
What is Metabolism ?
With metabolism, I mean metabolism as commonly understood as extracting energy from food particles and utilizing said energy for movement, reproduction, homeostasis etc but also a general phenomenon of interacting and manipulating free energy levers of the environement.
Thermodynamics as commonly understood applies to physical systems with energy and temperature.
Instead, I think it’s better to think of thermodynamics as a set of tools describing the behaviour of certain Natural Abstractions under a dynamical transformation.
cf. the second law as the degradation of the predictive accuracy of a latent abstraction under a time- evolution operator.
The correct formulation will likely require a serious dive into Computational Mechanics.
What is Life?
In 1944 noted paedophile Schrodinger posted the book ‘What is Life’ suggesting that Life can be understood as a thermodynamics phenomenon that used a free-energy gradient to locally lower entropy. Speculation of ‘Life as a thermodynamic phenomenon’ is much older going back to the original pioneers of thermodynamics in the late 19th century.
I claim that this picture is insufficient. Thermodynamic highly dissipative structures distinct from bona fide life are myriad. Even ‘metabolically active, locally low entropy engines encased in a boundary in a thermodynamic free energy gradient’.
No, to truly understand life we need to understand reproduction, replication, evolution. To understand biological organisms what distinguishes from mere encased engines we need to zoom out to its entire lifecycle—and beyond. The vis vita, elan vital can only be understood through the soliton of the species.
To understand Life, we must understand Death
Cells are incredibly complex, metabolically active membrane-enclosed engines. The Law of Metabolic Rot applied naievely to a single metabolically active multi-celled eukaryote would preclude life-as-we-know-it to exist beyond a few hundred years. Any metabolically active large organism would simply pick up to much noise, errors over time to persist for anything like geological time-scales.
Error-correcting mechanisms/codes can help—but only so much. Perhaps even the diamonodoid magika of future superintelligence will hit the eternal laws of thermodynamics
Instead, through the magic of biological reproduction lifeforms imperfectly persist over the eons of geological time. Biological life is a singularly clever work-around of the Law of Metabolic Rot. Instead, of preserving and repairing the original organism—life has found another way. Mother Nature noisily compiles down the phenotype to a genetic blueprint. The original is chucked a way without a second thought. The old makes way for the new. The cycle of life is the Ship of Theseus writ large. The genetic blueprint, the genome, is (1) small (2) metabolically inactive.
In the end, the cosmic tax of Decay cannot be denied. Even Mother Nature must pays the bloodprice for the sin of metabolism. Her flora and fauna are exorably burdened by mutations, imperfections of the bloodline. Genetic drift drives children away their parents. To stay the course of imperfect persistence the She-Kybernetes must pay an ever higher price. Her children, mingling into manifold mongrels of aboriginal prototypes, huddling & recombining their pure genomes to stave away the deluge of errors. The bloodline grows weak. The genome crumbles. Tear-faced Mother Nature throws her babes into the jaws of the eternal tournament. Eat or be eaten. Nature, red in tooth and claw. Babes ripped from their mothers. Brother slays brother. Those not slain, is deceived. Those not deceived controlled. The prize? The simple fact of Existence. To imperfect persist one more day.
None of the original parts remain. The ship of Theseus sails on.