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In a recent post I attempted to define life, a principle, for want of a more definitive nominative identity, which most humans 'know ... when they see it', such that the definition goes beyond merely identifying its essential qualities and characteristics, as dictionaries do. Specifically, I sought a definition that would not only invest this principle with a nominative identity necessitated by life's known existence in 4-dimensional spacetime, but also with a descriptor that would differentiate it from all other nominative identities we know to be inanimate. I intuited that the nominative should be drawn from the realm of natural science, and that the descriptor be drawn from philosophical considerations. By a sequence of what I considered to be plausible arguments (which see), I arrived at: Life is timshel entropy reduction.
It has since come to my attention that the concept of associating entropy reduction (or increase in negative entropy) with life is at least as old as I am, having been promulgated by none other than the Nobel-laureate physicist Erwin Schrödinger in his 1944 book What is Life?. I don't know whether to be embarrassed that I wasn't aware of this famous work or pleased for the ex post facto validation by such an eminent precedent. Truth be told, I am both embarrassed and pleased. Of course, I have ordered Schrödinger's book and anxiously await its delivery.
But, having gone out on a limb before, as is my wont, I will speculate that Schrödinger did not posit that life, strictly speaking, is potential (timshel) negative entropy. I have also just learned that in 1964, James Lovelock was among a group of scientists who were requested by NASA to make a theoretical life detection system. His considered opinion was, "I’d look for an entropy reduction, since this must be a general characteristic of life." This affirmation of Schrödinger's promulgation also does not incorporate the descriptor potential.
I think it important to qualify the entropy reduction, which pertains to a characteristic of life, as a potential (and specifically in the timshel sense of "Thou mayest cause") because it serves to differentiate life's realization of negative entropy from any local entropy reductions arising from random fluctuations in spacetime. Timshel invests life's ultimately realized entropy reduction with what philosophy of religion calls a wholly other nature, one that can only be approximated by words such as divine and sublime, whose source is not yet, and may never be, understood.
Thus, even at the very inception of life [please refrain from Big Bang puns], which for the sake of scientific precision could be defined as just prior to any measurable trace of realized negative-entropy, there is already timshel entropy reduction. So there is still a possibility that my definition for life has some viable claim to originality, unless Schrödinger's book (like his famous cat) negates this possibility upon examination.
In a recent post I attempted to define life, a principle, for want of a more definitive nominative identity, which most humans 'know ... when they see it', such that the definition goes beyond merely identifying its essential qualities and characteristics, as dictionaries do. Specifically, I sought a definition that would not only invest this principle with a nominative identity necessitated by life's known existence in 4-dimensional spacetime, but also with a descriptor that would differentiate it from all other nominative identities we know to be inanimate. I intuited that the nominative should be drawn from the realm of natural science, and that the descriptor be drawn from philosophical considerations. By a sequence of what I considered to be plausible arguments (which see), I arrived at: Life is timshel entropy reduction.
It has since come to my attention that the concept of associating entropy reduction (or increase in negative entropy) with life is at least as old as I am, having been promulgated by none other than the Nobel-laureate physicist Erwin Schrödinger in his 1944 book What is Life?. I don't know whether to be embarrassed that I wasn't aware of this famous work or pleased for the ex post facto validation by such an eminent precedent. Truth be told, I am both embarrassed and pleased. Of course, I have ordered Schrödinger's book and anxiously await its delivery.
But, having gone out on a limb before, as is my wont, I will speculate that Schrödinger did not posit that life, strictly speaking, is potential (timshel) negative entropy. I have also just learned that in 1964, James Lovelock was among a group of scientists who were requested by NASA to make a theoretical life detection system. His considered opinion was, "I’d look for an entropy reduction, since this must be a general characteristic of life." This affirmation of Schrödinger's promulgation also does not incorporate the descriptor potential.
I think it important to qualify the entropy reduction, which pertains to a characteristic of life, as a potential (and specifically in the timshel sense of "Thou mayest cause") because it serves to differentiate life's realization of negative entropy from any local entropy reductions arising from random fluctuations in spacetime. Timshel invests life's ultimately realized entropy reduction with what philosophy of religion calls a wholly other nature, one that can only be approximated by words such as divine and sublime, whose source is not yet, and may never be, understood.
Thus, even at the very inception of life [please refrain from Big Bang puns], which for the sake of scientific precision could be defined as just prior to any measurable trace of realized negative-entropy, there is already timshel entropy reduction. So there is still a possibility that my definition for life has some viable claim to originality, unless Schrödinger's book (like his famous cat) negates this possibility upon examination.
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