What I was getting at, which probably was not made clear enough, is that if someone or a collective of workers is going to buy or build a factory then they’re going to have to borrow money. — Brett

Only if someone else has all the money, not the workers.

Why is all the money collected somewhere else that the workers need to borrow it from, instead of just pooling their own savings together?

If the Republican party implodes because of Trumpism, what do you all expect the resultant new status quo will be? FPTP guarantees a two-party system. Will the Democrats split into corporatist and progressive wings? Will a third party (Libertarians?) take the Republcians' place?

Thoughts both about what is real and about what is moral predate the differentiation of methodologies into religious and non-religious. In the earliest societies there were wise folk who were turned to by others for guidance both about what is true and about what is good. Wise folk passed their wisdom on to the next generation and so wisdom traditions were born: stories of how the world came to be the way that it is, parables about why doing this or that is better or worse. Those were both proto-religion and proto-science, as they hadn't yet diverged. It was just the accumulated knowledge, about both reality and morality, of a given civilization.

As the structure and centralization and authoritarianism of larger civilizations developed, those wisdom traditions developed alongside that trend into religions proper as we now understand them. As they ossified their wisdom, both about reality and about morality, into an inflexible dogmatic form, continuing development of views about both reality and about reality became something contrary to that religious dogmatism, both the natural sciences as we now know them, and the less-developed normative equivalent thereof, secular theories of morality.

TL;DR: prescriptive thought predates religion just as much as descriptive thought does.

The real inauguration will be at the Four Seasons... — Echarmion

...Total Landscaping Company.

You take it from here, it's your thread and I don't feel like fighting your fight for you, I have more important life stuff I need to spend my time on.

once again the profit motive will dominate, competition from others and inflated prices for all goods will grow. — Brett

People charging whatever they can get away with (profit motive) is fine, so long as those people are the ones actually doing the work, and not just some gatekeeper between the producers and consumers siphoning off along the way.

But competition from others tends to reduce the ability for profit. It's lack of competition, because the wealth necessary to start competing is in so few hands, that leads to the ability to profit. If everyone is charging whatever they can get away with and anyone can start competing with them whenever, the market price is expected be driven down to cost. That's markets 101. The fact that that doesn't actually happen in practice is indicative of a problem somewhere.

So they just move into a ready made factory? Do they build a factory or buy it from someone? — Brett

Either, but in either case whoever actually builds the factory should get the full payment paid for the factory.

The factory-owners in the current setup don't actually build factories themselves. They pay others to build them factories, and pay them less than what those factories are actually worth to them, because they can, because they control the wealth and the workers who need it don't have much choice but to either accept what they can get or stage a rebellion against the entire world order.

The alternative is supposing that somewhere out there in space or hidden away in some kind of alternate dimension you could discover the object which is a physical law. Physical laws (and laws generally) aren't that kind of thing; they don't exist like that. But to say "physical laws don't exist" sounds like you're saying "physical things don't obey laws", i.e. "don't follow patterns in their behavior", which is of course not what is intended.

Are physical laws observable? — Marchesk

In the same sense that they "exist", yes. In the sense of patterns in observable phenomena, then yes, obviously: patterns in observable phenomena are themselves observable. In the sense of human theories about what exactly those patterns are, also yes: we can observe that humans do really have those theories.

What about the perceiver themselves? If everything is physical and If to be physical is to be perceived by something, how is there something to perceive and create all the physical by this perception? — Echarmion

This one is easy: the observer is also a physical thing. Physical things observe other physical things, and the web of all that observation (which is also interaction, physical things acting upon other physical things) is what constitutes reality.

No they don’t because they all have to pay the inflated price, which diminishes the value of their wages. — Brett

They're already paying the inflated price. The inflated price is the current market price. But that money they pay now goes to someone else. If that someone else wasn't in the picture, it would go to themselves instead; or alternately, they could just not charge themselves that.

Right now, they as a class (being both the producers and the consumers) pay (X+Y+Z)% = 100% of the current market price, and receive X% of it in wages, while the owners takes Y%, and Z% go to other factors of production.

If there were no separate owners involved, and they sold at the same price it's currently sold at, then they would still pay (X+Y+Z)%, but they would receive (X+Y)% in wages, with Z% going to other factors of production. Their net gain over the status quo: Y%.

Alternatively if there were no separate owners involved, and they sold at the minimum production price of (X+Z)% its current price, then they would pay only (X+Z)% (which is Y% less than the current price), and receive X%, with Z% going to other factors of production. Their net gain over the status quo: Y%.

So either the workers sell the product at the inflated price to other workers and keep the profit for themselves, and all the other workers do the same, so all the workers end up with more money from their increased wages; or else the workers sell at the production price to other workers, who end up keeping more of their money because of those those savings. Either way, the workers get more money.

The owners charging each others' workers (their customers) a profit margin doesn't magically generate more money out of nowhere, it just takes money that would have been kept either by the producers (as higher wages) or by the consumers (as lower prices), who are the same class of people either way.

:up:

This would obviously be in the form of better wages, which I would agree with, but the capital has be accumulated first. Who produces it? — Brett

The people who do the work produce it, just as they do now; they just get to keep all of what they produce, instead of some parasites siphoning it off of them because of a legal fiction that they're entitled to it. @Bitter Crank is already explaining this above (as have I, in a different aspect, in my explanation of the problems of rent and interest; I think that the workplace dysfunction is only a symptom of the greater dysfunction caused by people being born into debt, as nobody would accept the shitty wages so many are forced to if the alternative wasn't being completely denied access to the capital that they need to do the work necessary to generate what they need to live).

(And some capital is not produced by humans at at all, but just part of the natural world, to which nobody is entitled a disproportionate share).

Businesses almost always require borrowing in order to operate — Bitter Crank

Only because money is concentrated in so few hands (those of the banks) to begin with.

If the capital of the world was spread around more or less evenly, then borrowing from those who have control of the capital wouldn't need to be a thing.

You need to show me instead of telling me.

I’m responding to the OP itself, which is who are the 1%? — Brett

Yes, and it's your answers in admiration of them that make me anticipate your opinions on the institutes of capitalism:

1: They’re very hard workers

2: They’re very good a setting an objective and then making a plan to get there

3: They’re very good at projecting into the future

4: They’re very adaptable

5: Many of them are very innovative

6: They’re very good at choosing people to work with, understanding them, motivating them

7: They inspire people within their circle

8: They have a through understanding of the world they’re operating in

9: They’re very good at networking — Brett

I didn’t assume that just because of that question, but because of the impression I get from your other posts in this thread.
— Pfhorrest

Like what? — Brett

Your general stance of seeming to think that the super-rich got there by meritocratic means would suggest a likelihood that you don’t believe that there are governmental factors systemically favoring the already-rich, and so that you are probably okay with and support the systemic factors that do in fact favor the already-rich, like the enforcement of contracts of rent and interest.

But do please let me know if I was wrong and you instead agree with my critique of rent and interest.

Assuming I’m “ probably in favour of government action that benefits those who already have excess property” because I ask the question is very presumptive and obviously unproductive. — Brett

I didn’t assume that just because of that question, but because of the impression I get from your other posts in this thread.

For simplicity, just picture money as energy.

Stuff only happens when energy flows from concentrated areas out to less concentrated areas. That increases entropy, but it does work, in the physical sense. That's why doing work of any kind always increases universal entropy.

If some mechanism was in place to keep all the energy concentrated in one place, then no work would get done. Nothing would happen. Concentrated energy is potential for work to happen, but the work only happens when you let that concentration dissipate.

Of course, if you let all the energy flow out from its concentrations until it couldn't flow any more, then at the end of that you would have maximal entropy and no more work would happen, unless more energy was pumped into the system somewhere, from which it would flow to other parts of the system, doing more work along the way.

In an economy, that "energy", i.e. value, which money is representative of, flows into the system when humans do work, in the economic sense, which I called "ethical work" earlier to distinguish it from "physical work": when they create things of value. If one human does way more work than anybody else, creates a lot more value, then there will be a concentration of value around them, and that will then flow out into the rest of the economy and make more good stuff happen.

But merely concentrating pre-existing value (e.g. money) around one person doesn't make anything good happen. Rather quite the opposite. It's like how running a heat pump to pull all the heat from one area into another doesn't actually create a lower-entropy state: you (or the heat pump) are having to do work to achieve that, and wasting that work on just fighting the natural flow of energy that would otherwise power useful work.


In extremis, the physical and the ethical merge, because the source of human productivity (that is the input into the economic system that keeps new value being created and flowing around accomplishing good things) is ultimately the fuel that goes into humans themselves, food, which comes through the food web ultimately from sunlight. All our economies are in the end solar-powered, and without a source of energy like that -- and the heat sink of space to dump our waste energy into -- plants couldn't create sugars to fuel the ecosystem, and so humans couldn't create anything of value to fuel the economy.

But that doesn't seem related to the freedom of the market. Or, rather, since I don't really know in what sense a market could be free, the proper statement is that this seems a very specific definition of free. — Echarmion

A free market is one in which all trades are uncoerced.

I consider certain kinds of contract, including those of rent and interest, to be coercive because rather than just agreeing to owe some capital or labor in exchange for some other capital or labor, they require you reflectively agree to agree to owe more, and not even in exchange for anything more, just in "exchange" for the other party allowing you to keep what they've already given you. It's in the same category as selling oneself into slavery: it's giving up not just a first-order liberty (by taking on an obligation) or claim (by transferring property), but a second-order immunity (from having new obligations placed on oneself, or one's property transferred away from oneself). You can't freely give up your freedom like that; and it's not even really a trade at all, which are entirely on a first-order level.

What about the state not enforcing any contracts, a system where contracts are governed by trust. Such systems exist, but with some exceptions aren't usually called markets. The Islamic world of the middle ages apparently had well working markets with no state enforcement (and also strict bans on usury). — Echarmion

A market with no enforcement of contracts at all would be strictly freer, yes. Though I'm not sure it would be strictly better; I think some contracts are morally justifiable. Some narrow limitations on freedom are better than the alternative: I shouldn't be free to punch you in the face, for example, or to burn down your house (even if nobody's in it).

And yeah, not only the Islamic world of the middle ages but much of it today, as well as the Catholic world of the middle ages, have/had strict bans on usury, and I think that's great, except that they had a huge gaping hole: they only cared about money-lending, not any other kind of capital-lending. Renting out housing, for example, is perfectly okay by them. So there are convoluted contracts involving a combination of money lent "interest-free", property rental, and insurance, which replicate the effects of money lending at interest, and circumvent the whole ban, making the whole thing pretty toothless.

In my view introverts are the emotionally balanced people: those who neither need constant emotional support from others nor need others to vent their emotional overflow onto.

Introverts can still be perfectly sociable, even socially adept, and can even enjoy socializing — I consider myself an introvert, but when I do socialize I get very energized from being the center of attention and life of the party.

But an introvert doesn’t require constant social activity to just feel alright. An introvert is someone who is okay just being by themselves.

(Last year I suffered a year-long existential crisis where being alone with my thoughts was terrifying, and talking with some friends was one of the few things that made me feel temporarily okay. That made me wonder if extroverts, who can’t stand isolation ever, are just chronically going through what to my lifelong introverted eyes looked like an acute crisis).

Yes, I would agree that a free market is the closest to a natural economy. Do you think there should be government regulation? — Brett

In an ideal world, no, but you’re missing the point: I’m against “government regulation” that you’re probably in favor of, government action that benefits those who already have excess property in a way that they would not be able to benefit if it weren’t for that government action. In a truly free market we would expect capital to flow from areas of high concentration to areas of low concentration: a free market should have egalitarian results. That’s what Adam Smith expected.

What would a "truly" free market consist of, given that, historically, markets are state creations? — Echarmion

I disagree that markets are entirely state creations, although so-called “free” markets that capitalists love are full of state intervention to protect capital.

In my view the thing that makes such markets unfree is primarily the existence of rent and interest, which are only tenable institutions because of state enforcement of the contracts that create them. I think there are good deontological reasons why those kinds of contracts, as well as others, are not valid and so should not be enforced. The reaction of the market in the absence of such enforcement will then lead to significantly more egalitarian results.

I think the mobility issue now is less that people cannot move upwards from middle class, but that you're more likely to move down than up and, once down from middle class, you're unlikely to get up again. — Echarmion

This connects closely to my issue with rent and interest. If you own capital exactly sufficient for your needs, you don’t have to borrow but you also can’t lend or let. That is how I define middle class, and for people in that class, their mobility really is a product of their work.

But the further below that threshold you get, the greater the costs you must incur from borrowing the capital you need to live and work, so the more likely your mobility is to be downward. And the further above that thresholds, the more you can afford to lend or let out your excess for profit, and so the more your mobility will tend to be upward.

Basically, rent and interest create a pressure away from the middle class, making the rich richer and the poor poorer. Absent that, there isn’t even any motive to own excess, so it would tend to be sold off to those who need it — and thus, on terms they can afford, since nobody but them are buying — so that those with excess can spend the proceeds on things of use value to them — which, since they already have sufficient capital, would be the labor of those who need more capital and are willing to labor for it.

And so in the absence of rent and interest capital would naturally dissipate from concentrations of useless excess to the places it is needed, in exchange for the labor of those who need more — exactly like early market advocates like Adam Smith expected.

how is it “unnatural? — Brett

it's a result of state intervention to protect capital and wouldn't happen in a truly free market — Pfhorrest

On Hempel's dilemma: there's really more of a trilemma there, which illustrates why one fork of the supposed dilemma is clearly superior, even though it still has the effect of making the distinction between physical and nonphysical basically meaningless.

On one horn of the trilemma, we can assume that we already have everything figured out. This is the first horn of Hempel's dilemma, with its obvious problems.

On the third horn, we can assume that there are some things we will never figure out, that are forever beyond being comprehended together with the stuff we already have figured out in a way that makes sense of it all together. I hope the problems of this are just as obvious, but I can elaborate if necessary.

Meanwhile back on the second horn, we could instead assume neither of those, or in other words assume that we haven't yet figured everything out, but that there is nothing that we can never figure out. That leaves things categorized into either "things we have already figured out", and "things we haven't figured out yet". Meanwhile both of those sets, and everything we could possibly conceive of, falls together under the set of "things we could eventually figure out", which makes the distinction between that and its complementary set meaningless, in a way, because there is nothing in the complementary set; the set of things we could eventually figure out is the entire universe. Which is basically the thesis of physicalism.

Check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Econophysics

And especially https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermoeconomics


Also, from a future thread of mine:

... the prescriptive analogue of the descriptive ontological concept of substance is wealth: wealth is stuff of value. And just as in my ontology I hold real objects of substance to be constituted by the things they cause to happen (ala "to be is to do"), so too I hold that the value of wealth is constituted by the purpose that it serves: a thing is of value for the good that can be done with it.

This concept of wealth can be further decomposed into concepts of capital and labor, which in turn can be further decomposed to familiar ontological categories: capital is of value for the matter and space that it provides, while labor is of value for the energy and time that it provides. And just as matter is ultimately reducible to energy, so too capital is ultimately reducible to labor: capital is the distilled product of labor, worth at least the minimal time and energy it takes to obtain or create, and no more than the maximal time and energy it can save elsewhere.

Similarly, just as physical work happens when matter and energy flow through space and time, what we might call "ethical work" happens – good gets done – when wealth flows in an economy, each kind of wealth diffusing from where it is in higher concentration to where it is in lower concentration.


The concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands is not only unnatural (it's a result of state intervention to protect capital and wouldn't happen in a truly free market), but it's exactly counter to the flow of wealth that does "ethical work", that makes good happen.

You're talking about investing here, right? — BitconnectCarlos

I'm using investing as the clearest example, but generalizing the principle to risk in general.

Someone with enough money can afford to invest in a bunch of different businesses (buy stocks) and weather the downturns in the hopes of long-term profit.

But also a person with enough to reserves to afford to fail can afford to start a small business, that will probably fail like most do, on the hope of maybe making it big as an entrepreneur. Those with even more money can afford to take even more stabs at that, and so have even better odds of eventually making it. Someone who's concerned about making sure they have enough rent on the 1st can't risk anything like that.

And a person like that can afford to take a better-paying job in a distant and more expensive city, a job which they might lose leaving them somewhere they can't afford with no social support system, because they've probably got the savings to either live there long enough to find a replacement job, or pay the cost of moving back somewhere else. Someone with no savings hoping they'll have enough for rent on the 1st can't afford that risk.

There are all kinds of risky life choices that can pay off more in the long term, that it would be unwise for people clinging to the edge of survival to attempt, because they can't survive the slightest stumble, whereas someone with plenty of money (or family with money) to fall back on can take those risks and live to try again.


Also, on the topic of ambition, and your conversation with @apokrisis: society should be structured such that an unambitious person who just wants to stay at home and tend to their little garden can do so. As it is now, it takes enormous ambition to get out there and fight like hell for decades on end just to get a little home, never mind a garden. A cutthroat capitalist society doesn't merely reward the ambitious with greater luxuries, it simply doesn't allow the unambitious to live at all.

I had real ambition when I was young. I was always told I was so smart and capable that I could do anything, and I had enormous plans for this huge multimedia franchise that I wanted to spend my entire life working on. You can see the outline of it on my website -- the mere outline is 60,000 words, so that should give you a sense of the ambition I was going for there. I tried with some friends to start a small company to get that going, all of us working for equity, trying to build a first small project (a project literally 0.4% the size of the complete franchise goal), and then sell that to fund the next one, but of course that failed.

Half a decade into my adulthood, I realized that that's just not the kind of thing that someone like me with no money can possibly accomplish. I had had multiple complete-resets of my life progress by then, due to unexpected large expenses brought on by poverty in the first place (I had to drive shitty cars, and couldn't afford routine maintenance, so they kept dying, so I had to buy lots of shitty cars). And after I had to move out of my dad's tool shed, and start paying someone else rent, I dreamed of just getting to a place in life where I could afford to go broke again without losing everything, where I could survive not being ambitious.

So with great pain and reluctance I resigned myself to an "ordinary" life. Instead of trying to achieve great things, I would aim low, just try to secure my basic necessities like a house, just the minimal level of financial security, so I wouldn't be poor and on the verge of homelessness like my parents by the time my kids (that I then expected to have some day) were adults.

Half a decade later still, as I was approaching 30, and still nowhere near even beginning to buy a house, I started looking at statistics, seeing how much things really cost, how much people really made, and realized how fucking impossible it is for anyone to achieve even that bare minimum of security: the right to sit and starve somewhere without paying someone for the privilege. It was then that I realized that I wasn't statistically poor; I had, my entire life, been making around the median income. 50% of people were more poor than me. And yet even aiming low like that, just living an unambitious boring life, I had realized, was a pipe dream.

That's when I started getting really pissed off about the state of society, once I looked at the stats and saw that I wasn't a failure, I was doing better than most; that my problems were a systemic social failure, that was failing not only me, but almost everybody.

maybe you should reconsider the risk-averse attitude. I do think it would help considerably if you could find a better job — BitconnectCarlos

I have become more comfortable with risk as I’ve built up a safety net and can afford to lose a bit before I start winning. (And I am looking for a new job now, since my old once ceased to exist thanks to COVID-19... seven months and almost 1300 job applications later, still no luck).

That’s a general thing I like to point out when taking risk is argued to be what makes the rich deserve their rewards. The more you have beyond your basic needs, the more you can afford to gamble smartly, accepting some short term losses as you play the odds to long term victory. E.g where I am now in life, my investments can fluctuate up or down by hundreds or sometimes even thousands of dollars a day and I can afford to just ignore that so long as overall they trend upwards, because it’s not like I’m going to need to spend that money tomorrow. (Even now that I’m without a job, because I didn’t start investing until I already had a sufficient cash safety net set aside too, for exactly that reason).

But where I was a decade ago, a downward fluctuation of a thousand dollars would immediately knock me out of the game — I wouldn’t survive to make up for it over the long term. And that’s the kind of situation that most people are always in.

Talking about a "distribution of opportunity" honestly confuses me. — BitconnectCarlos

It’s just a way of speaking in terms of statistics, exactly like distribution of ability. A uniform distribution means the quantity in question is equal for everyone, a normal distribution means the quantity in question follows a gaussian curve across the population, etc.

Did you get straight As in school? Any college scholarships? — BitconnectCarlos

I got straight As / 4.0 on my first degree and almost straight (besides one B) / 3.9 on my second. And full state and federal grants, except for my last term where I was over the age to qualify for state grants.

The way that poverty affected my opportunity was creating an unstable home life and leaving me nowhere to fall back on, forcing me to work close to full time to support myself while going through school, handling all my own crisis expenses like car breakdowns, living in shitty crowded shared housing (which is what got me that one B: housemates kept me awake all night right before a final) while being terrified of eviction or rent increases because I would just be homeless since I didn’t have family housing to fall back on, etc. Which in turn made me extremely risk-averse, kept me in shitty jobs because they were stable instead of trying for better jobs that might fall through, which kept me from learning further on the job and so has made finding better work increasingly more difficult even as I’ve gotten more stability with age that could allow me to risk trying out possibly better jobs, etc.

I can think of a few decisions I could have made differently in my early adulthood that would have made a dramatic difference in my life today, despite the poverty of my family, but not having a stable family to guide me through those decisions meant the only reason I now know I should have chosen differently is because of hindsight.


Oh and also, having to pay rent instead of just living in my family’s second or third home for free, or getting help with a big enough down payment that interest on a mortgage wouldn’t exceed rent, etc.

I can’t think of any real-world examples of biological organisms doing that. That was just a hypothetical on my part.

Glad to see you responding to feedback so positively! That’s a refreshing change for this forum.

If we had equal distribution of opportunity, we would expect a normal distribution of outcome, to match the normal distribution of abilities.

But in the world we have today, someone like me — who is, according to all the aptitude tests of every kind I’ve ever taken, in the top 0.1% of ability — can just barely manage to keep up with the average (mean, not median) of financing outcomes, if they’re born into poverty like I was.

The usual responses I see to this is to say that my ability must not really be so great, that tests like that don’t really measure real-world ability, that the only way to measure someone’s actual ability is by their actual outcomes, so if you’re not rich then you simply must not actually be so smart or hard-working etc, because if you were then you would be rich. But that begs the question, since outcome is only a measure of ability IF opportunity is equal, which is exactly the point at issue.

(to the tune of “We’re Number One!”) We’re not the worst! We’re not the worst! We’re not the worst!

So the question it prompts, for me, is how can physicalism, as a philosophical principle, be credibly maintained in light of these conjectures? Given that science now acknowledges that it can account for only a small percentage of what is figured to exist, and that the remainder exists in a form that science can't even comprehend, how can such philosophical principles as 'causal closure' be said to hold? — Wayfarer

Causal closure isn’t so much a hypothesis as it is a definition: anything that has a physical effect is considered a physical thing. Since dark matter has physical effects, as you’ve explained, that classifies it as a physical thing.

That does mean that by definition we could never find anything non-physical, because anything that we could somehow find we would have to count as physical. So “physical” vs “non-physical” is really a meaninglessness distinction in the end. But that suits physicalism just fine: it’s really just saying to treat all stuff the same way we treat ordinary stuff we’re familiar with, consider it with the same scientific method, etc.

isn't that another way of saying that the mass of the system stayed the same, thus no PE change but there was an entropy change, so PE not always tied to entropy, which is what I'm getting at? — Sir Philo Sophia

You can have a change in entropy without a change in PE, but you can’t have a change in PE without a change in entropy.

Or more to the point here, if you’re going to store up some energy inside a system for later use, that will always cause a decrease in local entropy, because you have to pull things out of equilibrium to do that. But you can also pull things out of equilibrium, in a way that can be used to do later work, without storing up energy: just reorganizing it, or even removing it, can accomplish the same thing.

both increases local entropy and stores potential energy.
— Pfhorrest

sure, but there are just as many ways to increase PE while decreasing entropy — Sir Philo Sophia

That was a typo on my part, I meant “decreases” where I wrote “increases”.

I'm saying excess PE is what enables getting past canyons where there are no entropy gradients to exploit for work. — Sir Philo Sophia

I get that, and I mostly agree with it, but I am pointing out that you can “store energy” for use like that in a way that doesn’t actually require increasing your internal energy. Say you’re a car powered by compressed air. Rather than having to take in more air from the environment and compress it (increasing your energy), you could instead pump air from inside one chamber of yourself into another, creating a vacuum and a compression tank, making no change in energy. Or you could instead just pump air out of yourself to create a vacuum, reducing your energy. In any case, when you allow things to return to equilibrium you can exploit that flow of air to turn your wheels and get up over this next hill.

However, is that really defined as PE b/c all the hi gas pressure you are calling PE is all from the molecules KE. In physic PE c an have no motion, so that is why I never can understand what you mean by gas having PE to do thermodynamics work. — Sir Philo Sophia

It really depends on what level of abstraction you’re dealing with. At the deepest level everything is in constant motion at c and it is only the many momentary pauses to interact with other fields that creates the appearance of rest mass. This same phenomenon is how chemical bonds store energy, by confining the motion of their constituent particles.

In any case, if you look at a fluid on the level of a fluid rather than as an ensemble of particles, compression is an increase in potential energy, just like compressing a spring is. You can look at a lower level and see it as an increase in kinetic energy instead, but you can always do that for any potential energy.

Entropy is degree of non-random spreading throughout all possible micro-states. nothing to do w/ moving to "a lower-energy state". — Sir Philo Sophia

Maximum entropy is where energy is spread out as randomly as possible. Any deviation from that will mean that there is some energy somewhere that is at a higher concentration than somewhere else. Moving from that lower entropy state to a higher entropy state thus always involves some high energy concentration spreading out into a lower energy state, by dissipating its energy to places that had been lower energy than it before.

So wherever you have something at a higher energy state than it possibly could be, with some potential for its energy to be dissipated somewhere else that’s presently at lower energy, you have a low-entropy condition.

Please reframe your example "store of potential energy in a hot or high-pressure volume of gas, that you can use to do work by releasing it into the environment" to make sense in the above context. — Sir Philo Sophia

Your counterexample is including the inside of the volume and its surrounding environment as the system under consideration. In that case, energy remains constant (modulo the inevitable leakage at the edges of the environment), and the entropy of that entire system (volume and its surrounding environment together) increases.

My original example was considering the volume of gas, and probably some additional equipment, apart from its environment. Pumping gas into, or heating up the gas in, the volume, relative to the surrounding environment, increases the potential energy there, like your theory says is part of the definition of life. It also pulls it out of equilibrium with its surrounding environment, i.e. decreasing its local entropy, as my theory says is part of the definition of life.

Forming chemical bonds (making sugar out of CO2 and water using photosynthesis, for example) also both increases local entropy and stores potential energy.

I basically agree with your theory, as I said in my first post in this thread. But the reason I like it so much is that it reminds me so much of my own.

And under my own theory, things that don't technically increase the potential energy of the living system, but just reduce its local entropy, still count. If you had two volumes of gas at equal pressure, and used energy from photosynthesis to pump gas from one volume to the other, you wouldn't be increasing the potential energy in the system overall*, but you would be decreasing entropy, and when you let it return to equilibrium you can use that to do work.

You could also, as I said earlier, use a flow of energy (like photosynthesis, again) to pump gas out of a fixed volume, decreasing the amount of energy in the system, but because it's now out of equilibrium with its environment, that still creates a stored energy gradient that can be used to do work, as gas from the environment rushes back into the volume.

*(I'm actually not sure that that really wouldn't increase the total energy and hence mass of the system, because I'm pretty sure that a spring under tension technically has higher mass because of the energy it's storing).

I picked compressing gas as my example because it just seemed like a convenient non-chemical way to store energy, but think about springs instead if you want, if the entropy of the gas itself rather than the system it's a part of is distracting you. A spring under tension is out of equilibrium, it's not in the state it would naturally "want" to be in, so it takes work to put it into that state, and you can get work out of it by letting it out of that state. That's why I also mentioned water energy storage. What's important there is that water is out of equilibrium, it has a lower-energy state it will try to get to, which we can use to make it do work. Entropy isn't only about ensembles of microscopic particles. Big chunks of things moving around can change the entropy of the system they're a part of too. Anything being out of equilibrium in any way is a lower-entropy state.

In those cases, it might honestly be better to either approach the problem from a different angle or reframe it in some way... or just honestly try to think about something else. We all have limited mental energy and numerous problems that we would like to address so often sacrifices have to be made. Nothing wrong with jsut kicking back and wanting some time off from your problems either. — BitconnectCarlos

I agree completely. :up:

So, I would argue that if the mass of the particles did not decrease then they lost no energy, incl. no PE, as their entropy naturally increases toward maximum (thermal equilibrium) per 2nd law. — Sir Philo Sophia

A hot volume of gas does actually weigh more than a cold one per E=mc^2. Mass is not just in elementary particles but in the interactions between them; in fact most of the mass if ordinary matter lies in the chemical bonds between atoms, electrostatic bonds between electrons and nuclei, and nuclear bonds between nucleons and between the quarks inside them. The remainder comes from interaction with rhe Higgs field.

Personally I think the question of finding meaning or value in the universe is largely a personal/emotional one. — BitconnectCarlos

I agree that there is a question that is a personal emotional one, but it’s separate from the moral question; yet the possible answers to it follow the same pattern. I actually think that those possible types of answers to questions about reality and morality stem from applications of the analogous answers to the personal emotional question:

You have encountered a challenge. Maybe things are not going to work out as you expected. What do you do?

- Give up?
- Indulge in a happy fantasy about how it must definitely all be okay?
- Acknowledge the difficulty and keep trying anyway?

When the challenge is in figuring out what is real or moral, the last option is exactly the kind of criticism universalism that I advocate on those topics.

yes, synonymous and covers energy which is carried by the matter. — Sir Philo Sophia

Okay good, so we agree on that front.

does not necessarily always require a local entropy gradient to exploit when the living mater has already accumulated excess PE — Sir Philo Sophia

Having a store of potential energy is the same thing as there being an energy gradient to exploit. For example if your store of potential energy is a hot or high-pressure volume of gas, that you can use to do work by releasing it into the environment, it is the temperature or pressure differential between the volume and the environment that enables the release of that potential energy; if the environment was just as hot and high-pressure as the inside of the volume of gas, it would not be usable potential energy, relative to that environment.

Conversely, if you had a cold or low-pressure volume of gas, relative to the surrounding environment, that local absence of energy would make the energy of the environment "potential" relative to the volume: you could use an internal cold sink to force the environment to do work for you.

Similarly, lifting water above the surrounding ground is what lets you get work out of it when it flows back down; if the ground was all the same level as the water, the elevation of the water would be useless. Unless, of course, you then dug out the ground below the level of the water, in which case there would then be a difference, and you could let the water flow down into the hole you dug, and use that to do work.

The absence of such a differential is the same thing as the presence of entropy, so "increasing its store of potential energy" is the same thing as "reducing its local entropy".

OK, but my definition goals are far more ambitious than yours! Note that mine covers all matter what-so-ever: "Scientific Definition of Living vs inanimate matter.... any grouping of matter or energy which " — Sir Philo Sophia

Are you differentiating “animate vs inanimate” from “living vs nonliving”? I took them to be synonyms for our purposes, in which case a definition of life also divides all matter and energy into those systems that meet that definition (living or animate) and those that do not (nonliving or inanimate).

veering away from the course least actions costs more wasted energy which means the matter will generate more heat (i.e., entropy), which eventually must be transferred to the environment of the motion. — Sir Philo Sophia

That’s just another way of saying that to veer away from the course of least action requires an energy source and a waste energy sink, i.e. an energy gradient to exploit, which are also exactly the conditions in which locally reducing entropy is possible.

The universe as a whole always takes the course of least action and always increases in entropy, as those are almost synonyms; but having an exploitable energy gradient makes it locally possible for a limited system to run counter to that trend.

If you plot light speed (c) on a graph [distance (d) on the y-axis and time (t) on the x-axis] you'll get a speed graph that's almost indistinguishable from the y-axis. — TheMadFool

Using what units?

If you plot distance in lightyears and time in years, position over time at the speed of light draws a 45 degree slope.

If you plot miles per hour (which you probably did), you get a much shallower slope.

If you plot kilometers per second, you did a different shallow slope.

If you plot gigaparsecs per femptosecond, you get a much less shallow slope.

The units make all the difference.

If you're concerned with time in hours and distance in miles, then yeah, a beam of light can travel such an absurdly huge number of miles in an hour that for all you (or your personal calculator) care it might as well be infinite

But it's technically not, and measuring in different units shows that.

One of the main things that Nietzsche talks about, and that he's in agreement with many Christians about, is that when you remove the God element out of theology - whether it be Christianity, Judaism, etc. - is that the whole system collapses. — BitconnectCarlos

Something like this is, I think, the main error underlying pretty much all philosophical error: that the only alternatives are either abject nihilism or religious faith. Cynical relativism or dogmatic transcendentalism, pick your poison... or so they'd have you think.

I agree that if you just take the religious view and remove God from it, it collapses into a nihilistic view, but I think that that serves as a criticism of the religious view, and of the nihilistic view. The religious view is essentially just nihilism, patched over with "because God". The nihilistic view is essentially just religion if you pulled God out of it.

What is needed -- and to the OP , is what I think "goes beyond Nietzsche" -- is an alternative to that dichotomy entirely.

Reject faith as in dogmatism, but keep faith as in freedom of opinion without absolute proof; thus likewise rejecting skepticism as in the greedy cynicism that would lead to nihilism, but keeping skepticism as in critical thinking, a willingness to question anything.

Likewise, reject objectivism as in transcendentalism, the idea that what is actually real or moral are "out there" somewhere beyond and utterly detached from the appearances of things seeming real or moral, but keep objectivism as in universalism, the commitment to an unbiased view of what is real and what is moral; thus also rejecting subjectivism as in relativism, but keeping subjectivism as in phenomenalism, empiricism and hedonism.

Leaving you with a liberal criticism -- open to possibilities but also cautious of errors, both about knowledge and justice -- and a universalist phenomenalism, as in an empirical realism and an altruistic hedonism.

The "self" has to be dealt with here if we are going to be able to make this division between work and entropy clear as "work" does speak to there being indeed a selfish interest in play. — apokrisis

Okay, that makes more sense of the von Neumann quote which otherwise didn’t seem connected to what you were saying, which I thought was about reproduction.

In the sense that I mean in my definition, the “self” that is alive just is whatever system it is that is benefitting (entropically) from the “water wheel in the stream” (great metaphor), so long as that water wheel is in turn a part of the system in question.

The definition of life can itself be seen as a guide for where to draw the boundary of a “self”: too small and the water wheel is only powering something outside that boundary, so the boundary is not around something SELF-productive (only something productive upon something outside itself); but too large and the entropic waste products of that process are contained within the boundary too, and so the system as a whole is not productive at all, self- or otherwise.