#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.
Found it! 😎. It is called the
***Maximum Entropy Production Principle (#MEPP)***:
>The so-called maximum entropy production principle (MEPP) is known much less (even among specialists in physics of nonequilibrium processes). This antipode, as its name seemingly means, of Prigogine's principle has been overshadowed by its more famous twin. MEPP was independently proposed and used by several scientists throughout the 20th century when they dealt with general theoretical issues of thermodynamics and statistical physics or solved specific problems. By this principle, a nonequilibrium system develops so as to maximize its entropy production under present constraints.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0370157305004813
*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.
@Kihbernetics I believe that theorizing about self-organization (especially in terms of thermodynamics) only in rare cases leads to an understanding of what happens.
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.
A system doesn't ***feed*** on #order (or #negentropy) from the environment it has to ***create*** it.
You can't get your desk organized by just acquiring some order from the environment. You have to do some #work and use some of your #free_energy. Schrödinger admits as much: