[Martin Taylor 2014.08.21.00.23]
This last para finished with "Unless you start" which was supposed
to be completed with something along the lines of “trying to see
what I might be attempting to get across rather than trying to find
ways to make out that what I say is physically impossible, we won’t
get anywhere. So I suggest going back and looking at my
explanations, and do it with an assumption that I am working within
the bounds of normal physics. With luck and goodwill, I think you
will understand how stabilizing an internal variable against
disturbances that would otherwise vary it (i.e. tracking) is
maintaining the internal structure against the decay implied by the
second law.”
···
Message sent before it was finished…
[Martin Taylor 2014.08.21.00.02]
Have you ever imagined an organism that is isolated from the restof the universe?
… (waiting for you to think about it)…
What do you see of this organism? What does it see of you?
I will help. The correct answers are nothing in each case. In the
first case because if photons reflected off it, they would change
their momentum and so would the organism; in the second case
because no photons could penetrate it since they would deposit
energy into the the organism.
Since I showed you not once, but twice, I don’t think your comment
is apposite.
Philip is right that quarreling is unhelpful.
Martin
[From Rick Marken (2014.08.20.1700)]
Martin Taylor(2014.08.20.17.47)–
RM: I guess I took thermodynamicinstability to refer to the second law
of thermodynamics, which says that the
entropy of an isolated system never
decreases.
MT: Did you notice the word “isolated”?
RM: Yes. And apparently I got your point of viewbasically correct since you say in your last post: “:
what
decreases the entropy of a living thing is simply the
fact that a controlled variable IS controlled”. So you
are saying that living systems do decrease their
entropy and this decreased entropy indicates that they
are control systems. Since the the second law of
thermodynamics says that entropy never decreases in an
isolated system (such as an organism) you are also
saying that organisms violate the second law of
thermodynamics.
RM: Well, I still would like to know how yourthermodynamic point of view shows that control is
involved in a simple tracking task. But I imagine that
you can’t do that and that that is why you are
attributing to me a desire to not be “helped”. Nice.