In my last essay I claimed that “creative action” is the ultimate meaning of life. In this essay I will try to define few fundamental concepts that I use in the Creative Action theory of meaning of life. I will use these concepts in the next article to layout what is creative action and how it applies to the life of humans and why it is the ultimate meaning of life.
Time is the fire in which we all burn. Decay and deterioration, in due time, of every object, animate or inanimate, is irrefutable. Humanity has searched for eternal youth for eons, however until recently many adventurers seeking the fountain of youth did not realize that they are up against the most fundamental laws of nature, the second law of thermodynamics. For many scientists second law of thermodynamics comes closest to the absolute law of nature that governs everything in the universe.
The second law of thermodynamics states that as time progresses, disorder increases in any closed system. This innocuous sounding statement describes most intimate and profound nature of the universe that we dwell. In essence the statement above defines the arrow of time and what time does to “stuff” in any closed system. It is the implication of this law that you can see a cup of water fall down and break into pieces , but will not see broken shards of glass assemble spontaneously into a cup and jump back on top of the table.
Before going any further, let me explain the second law of thermodynamics via example for those readers who may not be familiar with it. Imagine an empty room with two partitions, dividing room into two sections. Now fill each section with two different gases, say oxygen and carbon dioxide respectively. Now remove the partition wall. According to second law of thermodynamics, overtime, the two gases in the room will not remain in their respective section and will ultimately mix with each other. In other words the neat order you had created with a separate section for oxygen and carbon dioxide will mix into a single mixture of both gases. This will happen because matter at the most basic level is in continuos motion making the molecules of different gases bump and interact with each other and mixing into a single uniform mixture over time. And this is it – this simple and intuitive concept is the essense of second law of thermodynamics. Hopefully this example will make the smokers think twice before smoking a cigar in the living room of a non smoker’s house, thinking that it will not bother their hosts in their bed room.
Generalizing the above example, second law of thermodynamics state that entropy, also known as the measurement of “disorder”, will increase with time in any closed system. In a poetical sense everything deteriorates with time and we see the results of this when human body mixes back into the ground, ashes to ashes and dust to dust — Time will burn the order into chaos and disorder.
For those readers who want to get a better appreciation of laws of thermodynamics, I highly recommend a short book by Peter Atkins, called “Four laws that drive the Universe” It is a reasonably easy read and will give you a more precise understanding of the second law of thermodynamics than what I am wiling to explain in this short essay.
The second law of thermodynamics impacts the working of our universe at every level. From the working of simple systems like the gas filled room described above to the working of the galaxies, burning of the stars, breaking water cups and aging of our bodies. Without the second law of thermodynamics we would have had a happy childhood as anything we mistakenly broke could be reversed before we get a scolding from our parents. In a sense arrow of time gets defined by this law, thus disallowing us to go back in time, as travel in reverse direction would allow us to reverse the second law of thermodynamics. (for those of you interested in potential of time travel utilizing theory of relativity and it’s implications of bending time, please wait for my article on the nature of time)
Scientist use the second law of thermodynamics to predict the future of the universe as a gray, cold and dark place which would have no structure to it. Over time all energy will be used up, stars will burn and either turn into black holes or non luminous blobs of matter that will be spread in all directions. Indeed a dark and depressing picture. Again in a poetical sense I call this structure eating nature of the Universe the ultimate evil – the destroyer of any discernible structure.
A typical physicist will tell you that there is nothing in the universe that counters the second law of thermodynamics. And while in principle I agree with that statement, I am proposing in this series of articles that the fundamental nature of life is the core counteractive force against the chaos generating nature of the universe governed under the second law of thermodynamics. Moreover life is an instance of an emergent complex dynamical system that will spontaneously emerge in the universe given the physical laws that govern our current nature – in other words life is not an accident but laws of our universe favor spontaneous, although relatively rare, creation of life or as some would say that laws of our universe are designed to create life.
Before going any further I want to state that this is a hypothesis and is not based on scientific facts. However I have strong reasons to believe in the general principles that I am laying out here but above all this is also my belief on which I base many of the core principles of “Creative Action” theory of meaning of life.
Life at it’s core is an intricate organization of matter. Life embodies the ultimate order creation force. First of all life is a sophisticated structure in of itself, capable of maintaining homeostasis. Additionally, as opposed to other sophisticated inanimate structures in the universe, e.g. Star systems, life is designed to propagate over time increasingly sophisticated information. In other words instead of deteriorating over time, life actually evolves to be better and more structured than before. Therefore instead of deteriorating with time, life creates order and structure and spreads that structure beyond individual organism. For example first single celled organisms (prokaryotes) evolved into multi cellular organism (Eukaryotes), and the same process created numerous complex life forms including us.
I can hear some readers saying that this is a violation of second law of thermodynamics that I just described and claimed to be one of the fundamental laws of nature. This is known as evolution paradox and a careful reader will recognize that this is not a violation of second law of thermodynamics. Second Law of thermodynamics states that overall disorder increases with time in a “closed system”. This does not prevent order from increasing in part of the system as long as more disorder is created somewhere else in the system. In other words life might be taking in more energy and creating disorder as its by product (e.g. global warming) in the over all universe while still creating order in the bio-sphere.
Traditionally scientists have viewed emergence of life on a small blue/green planet as a sheer accident. However having placed life at the same level as the most fundamental law of nature, the obvious question emerges as to the importance of life in the universe. While in the past considering life as a fundamental feature of the universe was met with ridicule by serious physicists, however recently this question has received very serious thought and recognition from all respected thinkers of science, from Stephen Hawkins, Roger Penrose to Lee Smolin and Brian Green. The reason for serious thinking behind this question emerged from the fact that our Universe seems to reside in a “Golilocks Zone” of physical laws that are extremely well suited for life (it is called Goldilocks zone because it is neither too cold nor hot, but just right for the existence of life) If many of the universes constants (charge of electron, gravity between masses, mass of proton etc) were off by even 0.01% then universe and life in the universe would not have been possible. This gave rise to the concept of “Anthropic principle”, which basically states that we are here because universe is the way it is. If it were not like this we wont be here and wont be asking these questions. In other words universe as we know is extremely fine tuned to harbor life and laws of the universe that we inhabit has properties needed to harbor life as deeply intrinsic as any other physical law …. Or it might even be more fundamental then any other law. For more reading on this topic I would recommend the reader to read Stephen Hawkins’ Grand Design or for a more controvercial views read Robert Lanza’s book called Biocentrism.
Given the basic argument on life’s importance in the universe, let me turn attention to the basic property of life that matter to our current area of discussion – it’s creative power for establishing and propagating order. In affect life is a process by which physical structure gets increasingly organized and over time more and more of the physical substrate will get increasingly organized — i.e., population growth and evolution. Life finds ways to utilize energy to create structure of the substrate it is built on (carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen etc. —however substrate could also be silicon or other materials) and the preserves that structure by passing on that structure on its offspring. And the information is not just perserved but improves the information passed on either deliberately (cultural evolution) or unconsciously (via natural evolution). Moreover ability of parents to create large number of offspring enables life to expand its footprint to the available substrate and available resources. So just like second law of thermodynamics, given an open system of unlimited supply of substrate and resources, life can continue to grow and create order across the universe.
If a poet were to interpret the above discussion, he or she might say that disorder and decay is the ultimate evil that is destroying the structure, order and everything beautiful in the universe whereas life is the ultimate good that is creating order and spreading the beauty of structure. He might also ask so who will ultimately win this war, good or evil? Some scientists will answer that disorder and decay will win as even life is creating more disorder in the universe under the second law of thermodynamics. However others might recognize that the answer is not as simple. Second law of thermodynamics is only applicable to closed systems. And if the universe is infinite then the answer could be quite different. In an open, expanding and infinite universe, life can continue to spread order and increase order in the universe indefinitely, while the expanding universe will continue to have more of the universe to draw upon for energy for its order creation process. In other words while in a closed system second law of thermodynamics will incorporate life and will ultimately win, in an open and infinite system two will at least have an equal footing. And since today we believe universe could be infinite and expanding, this is a very likely scenario.
The above discussion of infinite universe and its implications on the power of second law of thermodynamics might be confusing to some who are not familiar in dealing with concepts involving infinities. To help explain how second law of thermodynamics and life can be equal in infinite universe while second law of thermodynamics contains life processes in a finite universe, I am going to use an example from a simple high school mathematics. Imagine two set of numbers from 1 to 10. First set, called A has all the numbers from 1 to 10. Therefore A = {1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10}. While set B only has even numbers from 1 to 10. So B = {2,4,6,8,10}. Clearly B is smaller and is contained within A. In other words if A and B had a war, A will win over B. While B will kill 2,4,6,8,10, A will be left standing with 1,3,5,7,9 after B would have exhausted its number-soldiers.
Now consider the same example of set A and B, but this time these sets are infinite. So A = {1,2,3,4,5…forever} and B = {2,4,6,8…forever}. Now if these sets have a fight who will win? …. Think about it before reading further….
If you answered no one, then give yourself a pat in the back. However if you answered A, then trust me that the c grade you got in your high school math was well deserved and not a spiteful act on behalf of your math teacher. If you are still wondering why no one will win, you can solve this by noticing the following. You can assign the first element of set B to fight the first element of A (2 fighting 1) and second element of B to fight second element of A (4 fighting 2) ad infinitum. The 10 millionth element of B will fight 5 millionth element of A…since neither will ever run out of numbers they will keep fighting forever. For every element, say n, in A there is a corresponding element 2n in B. In other words A and B are exactly equal sets. So while in a closed system or finite settings A wins over B, in infinite setting they become equals. My argument is that same logic applies to the counterbalancing force of order creating force of the universe, life and its order destroying force or second law of thermodynamics.
At this point we have introduced our protagonist, Life, as the ulitmate creator of order and structure in the Universe and second law of Thermodynamics as the antagonist in our story of the meaning of life. In my next article I will use some of these terms to establish the tenets of theory of “Creative Action” and its implications for the meaning of life as it applies to us as human beings.
Note to reader: I am neither supporting or refuting any religious ideology. The intent of the effort to define the meaning of life in this manner is to approach it on the basis of universal principles that we can agree on without any specific religious ideology. I would strongly implore the reader of this article to not read this from religious perspective, especially from any one specific religious ideology.