The nature of life and extropic evolution

[bascule]

I had a lousy day today. I woke up and hopped in my car to drive to work, only to discover that my battery was dead. I popped the hood of my car to stare at the immense amount of order, design, and technical sophistication that the engine represented, and how useless it all was with a dead battery.

 

So I hopped on my bike and rode to work. As I was nearing the end of my journey, my workplace in sight at the top of the hill before me, I swerved to avoid a car who clearly saw me as merely an obstacle. In the process, my jeans, my favorite pair of jeans, went over the top of the sprocket and were shreadded. I tried to continue riding, only to find my jeans caught in the sprocket again. Now my jeans had reached the point where they were in such a high state of entropy as to clash with the extropy of the bike, and the technological sophistication of the bike was, in turn, rendered useless.

 

Not wanting to ride home having to deal with a pair of torn jeans, I called up a friend to pick me up and give me a ride home. He arrived, parked, and met me at the door. But as we were ready to leave, his engine would not turn over. Something was also wrong with his battery. Fortunately, we found someone to jump start his car.

 

Later that night I sat and stared at the tear in my jeans the sprocket had made. All the order that my jeans had represented was reduced to near uselessness. As I stared at the rip, I began to ponder what it really meant in the grand scheme of the universe. This is what I came up with:

 

We are producers and consumers of extropy. Extropy is, for all intents and purposes, something which is orderly for a purpose. We can combine raw materials and tools and produce things which are in a higher state of extropy than when they originally started. Of course, this process increases the overall entropy of the universe. Extropy must be bought for the cost of entropy.

 

We are entropy-powered extropy assemblers. We exist in a large cascade of entropy-powered extropy assemblers who evolved in a progressive sequence which built better and better extropy assemblers. The reason why this was necessary was that extropy needs to be protected from entropy because unsheltered extropy is quickly dissolved by entropy. So along with better extropy-assemblers, better and better extropy sheltering systems were also devised.

 

Extropy sheltering and extropy assembly have been progressively evolving via the rules of natural selection. The process has grown increasingly complicated, and the varieties of extropy that have been produced has exploded immensely. We’ve now built our own extropy assemblers which are external to the process of life, and we’re finding better and better ways of using these systems to increase the extropy of the world. This is all part of the external phenotype of mankind, and it is part of an overall pattern of extropy assemblage and sheltering which is inherent to the process of life itself.

 

Life is the origin of all extropy, and the planet’s extropy has been increasing exponentially since the dawn of life. As time goes by the orderliness of our planet has continued to increase, and also found better and better ways of increasing. This notion must be coupled with the realization that unsheltered extropy is quickly destroyed by entropy. Thus the expansion of extropy on the planet is not smooth: mass extinction events, in which extropy is lost because it could not seek shelter from cataclysm, results in massive losses in extropy. But overall, higher and higher states of extropy are accumulated. There is most certainly not only an overall progressive trend towards the production of more extropy, but also a progressive trend towards better extropy production systems and diversification of types of extropy produced, all of which feed back on eath other in an incomprehensibly complex order assembling mechanism.

 

Society continues to complexify through a multifaceted assemblage of incomprehensibly complex additive feedback loops. Their collective operation gives rise to Kurzweil’s Law.

 

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[aguy2]

bascule,

Bye-in-large this was a well written treatment. I especially liked the concept of 'sheltering', but nonetheless it contains what I think are some important misconceptions.

 

If extropic precursors had not developed, the universe would not have supported biological life. On one hand sub-atomic particles had to readily form relatively stable, extropic H and HE atoms and early stars had to be able to manufacture heavier elements. On another hand the slight instabilities (valences, ect) in elements where necessary if elements where to develop into the precursors of biological life. There seems to be a pattern of extropy taking two steps forward and one back.

Life is the origin of all extropy

Your treatment seems to ignore that biological life is itself a result of an 'ongoing, staged process' that generally leads to increased extropy, but an extropy whose slight entropic tendencies permit the development of the next stage of increased complexity.

 

aguy2

[bascule]

aguy2, your complaints are all quite poignant. Indeed, if Lee Smolin's fecund universe theory is true, then our universe and by extension those which came before it are indeed ordered for a purpose, namely that of producing other universes, and therefore universes themselves would have extropic properties.

 

And by "ordered for a purpose" I mean humans, in hindsight, can look at their operation and see underlying purpose, regardless of whether or not that purpose originates naturally (after all, those who believe in abiogenesis would still claim that the purpose of naturally arising replicators is to make copies of themselves) or if it was consciously directed.

[aguy2]

if it was consciously directed

 

Do you think there would any substantitive differences between the phrases:

 

"if it was consciously directed"

and

"if it was consciously encouraged"?

 

aguy2