#Life as the ultimate form of #self_organization is usually thought of as resisting the Second Law of thermodynamics that says all #order eventually dissipates over time into a state of thermal equilibrium and enduring uniformity (disorder).
An alternative explanation says that organization (order) spontaneously emerges in dissipative structures because of the Second Law of Thermodynamics because ordered structures are much better at dissipating energy (thus more rapidly increasing the #entropy) than disordered ones.
The explanation (for which I now can’t find the proper reference😟) exemplified this with whirlpools and how they spontaneously emerge because the water molecules in them don’t bump into each other as much so the flow through the drain (transition to an equilibrium state) is faster when they are streamlined (organized) into a vortex.
Terrence W. Deacon writes beautifully about this conundrum:
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsta.2022.0282#d7508913e1
I have a somewhat different position on his second statement, however.
I think there is a self that determines how the system responds to an external perturbation.
What is a better approach in your opinion?
I don’t think you can evade talking about work and energy in general if you want to understand how life and the “self” came to be.
@Kihbernetics We may never know it. I can provide a pointer to hypotheses involving self-organized catalytic processes. Non-testable hypotheses, that is. Complexity is just that: non-formalizable.
@Kihbernetics I believe that theorizing about self-organization (especially in terms of thermodynamics) only in rare cases leads to an understanding of what happens.