Dear Evgenii and list
That fact is - as Schrödinger and Prigogine points out - that more and more
complicated self-organized systems develop feeding on the general growth of
entropy in the universe. These systems order more and more of their
surroundings in order to support and prolong their own existence. We are
already influencing the whole of our planet and is beginning to explore other
planets in the solar system in order to use them for our own purpose. So,
Peirce is right that our rationality is influencing the universe. Who can say
if order or chaos will win in the end?
Best
Søren
-----Oprindelig meddelelse-----
Fra: Evgenii Rudnyi [mailto:[email protected]]
Sendt: 28. juni 2014 09:44
Til: [email protected]
Emne: Re: [PEIRCE-L] The second law of thermodynamics
There is a nice historical book
Helge Kragh, Entropic Creation: Religious Contexts of Thermodynamics and
Cosmology, 2008
where the author discusses the heat death debates in 1850-1920. Peirce is
mentioned there and a quote from the book is below.
p. 187-188 "In 1891 he [Peirce] described his hypothesis as follows:
'The state of things in the infinite past is chaos ... the nothingness of which
consists in the total absence of regularity. The state of things in the
infinite future is death, the nothingness of which consists in the complete
triumph of law and absence of all spontaneity.
Between these, we have on our side a state of things in which there is some
absolute spontaneity counter to all law, and some degree of conformity to law,
...'
This picture, starting from chaos and ending in an ordered and symmetrical
system, turns the ordinary interpretation of the second law on its head. Some
years earlier, in a 1884 lecture on 'Design and Chance', he declared that the
heat death - in which 'there shall be no force but heat and the temperature
everywhere the same' - was unavoidable. Confusingly, the next year he rejected
the global heat death scenario, retracting to a position similar to that of
many other evolutionary progressivists of the Victorian era: 'But, on the other
hand, we may take it as certain that other intellectual races exist on other
planets, - if not of our solar system, then of others; and also that
innumerable new intellectual races have yet to be developed; so that on the
whole, it may be regarded as most certain that intellectual life in the
universe will never finally cease.' Perhaps he thought, such as he said in his
'Design and Chance', that the living universe would be saved by what he called
'chance', an influence he considered to be opposite to dissipative forces, of
what some later authors referred to as 'entropy'."
Evgenii
--
http://blog.rudnyi.ru
On 27.06.2014 17:15 Stephen C. Rose said the following:
> How fixed is the scientific argument for this law? Certainly in this
> century there have been some who have chipped away at the idea of
> entropy as a fixed star in an otherwise fallible (subject to
> revision) scientific universe. And I am unaware of where Peirce stood
> on this matter. Were his notions of continuity and logic uneasy in the
> shadow of the assertion that everything falls apart?
>
> *@stephencrose <https://twitter.com/stephencrose>*
>
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