>in that life can be roughly separated from nonlife by the observation that organisms do appear to tend toward less entropy in a universe where everything else seemingly does the opposite.
In a superficial way, I suppose, but it's still wrong. Another way to look at it is that life actually tends to a more efficient increase of entropy than otherwise would be expected (when compared to non-living processes). For examples, humans are a complex chemical reaction that has reached the point where it can release energy through splitting of atoms - which raises entropy so much higher than it would be been possible otherwise and completely impossible via non-living chemical reactions.
A squirrel will spend energy to collect nuts and bury them together in the ground, rather than having them scatter and roll and blow willy-nilly. A person is constantly sweeping up the dust inside their house, painting and repainting the trim of their windows, and organizing the cables in their desk drawers.
Life can most certainly be viewed as a counterforce to entropy. Certainly at the philosophical level, but why not at the genetic level too, reproduction being the repeated organization and duplications of chemical bonds from smaller constituents.
I certainly see my life as a constant battle against entropy, an adult's life consists pretty much 80% of putting things in things.
>I certainly see my life as a constant battle against entropy
lets consider an amount of non-live matter equal to your mass. That pile of non-live matter wouldn't be able to generate amount of entropy that you will generate during your lifetime. Your actions of "battle against entropy" is a more faster way to increase total entropy. That is the reason of live matter existence - it is a faster way to generate entropy, and thus it is direct result of the 2nd law which states that any system evolves among the entropy maximization gradient. And live matter organizes into more and more complex systems - bodies/colonies/organisms, smarter organisms, societies - because that generates even more entropy than the simple set of constituent parts would generate on their own. Compare entropy generated by a 10 strong tribe in Amazon and 10 regular Americans or Europeans (bonus point - consider that the civilization complexity allows for 100 "civilized" people all actively generating entropy where hardly 10 could barely survive without the civilization). One can notice that intelligence arises as the power multiplier of live matter entropy generation capability.
>Life can most certainly be viewed as a counterforce to entropy.
Sure, as long as we qualify the terms correctly. That is, you need to decrease the resolution of what you mean by 'entropy' because each one of your examples actually increased entropy moreso than inaction would have.
Regardless, this goes against the author's point, because in each case 'work' needs to be done to reverse the entropy of a local system (e.g. scattered nuts) at the expense of the larger system (squirrel heat emitted into the universe)
>I certainly see my life as a constant battle against entropy, an adult's life consists pretty much 80% of putting things in things.
Sure, with proper qualification that is one way to look at things. This works because of the resolution that we care about. Namely, we don't care about heat generated from our bodies, or smart phones, or nuclear reactors, accelerating global entropy, but we certainly care about dusty rooms.
Again, it seems like the author disagrees with this view.
>Regardless, this goes against the author's point, because in each case 'work' needs to be done to reverse the entropy of a local system (e.g. scattered nuts) at the expense of the larger system (squirrel heat emitted into the universe)
I submit to you that you did not get the point the article is trying to make because it was exactly this. When considering the animal expending work as the system, it's entropy doesn't decrease because it isn't a closed system. You can then retort that the 2nd law concerns a larger closed system, but you can keep playing that game until the 2nd law essentially becomes a tautology, and becomes useless in understanding the system at hand.
I don't know if the author made this point explicitly (he hinted at it at the end), but one needs to actually know the details of the system under consideration, and very general laws can bring some level of context but will be limited in terms of the actual relevant or useful insight one can glean.
If you consider "organism" and "environment" to be separate systems which may exchange energy/entropy, would it be fair to suppose that living organisms dump entropy into their environments to maintain internal order?
I agree that this is a typically murky discussion since the concept of entropy for a complex organism gets pretty handwavy...
I'm supposing that an organism in "living" condition has many orders of magnitude fewer valid microstates than the same constituent atoms/molecules would have once life sustaining reactions cease and decomposition begins - there are only so many valid ways to assemble a given living being...
I think we are agents of accelerating disorder, somewhat like a growing fractal with order inside but a much higher disorder produced at the edge. The internal order supplies the growth, and the external disorder grows exponentially atop it.
Behaviourally, when you look at a lot of the things we do (e.g. breaking big chunks of metal to tiny coins and distributing them into people's pockets, or turning big clumps of clay and tree and metal into small piles to live in, or retail stores in general), you can see that humans are pretty good distributors, dis-aggregators, disintegrators.
At least so far, we don't disintegrate most things to the point that they are useless. Only to a point where they serve our growth. If one day we were to become a truly spacefaring, or an intergalactic, disintegrator, we might meaningfully hasten the advance of universal disorder as a whole. What better purpose for life, as a function of the universe, than to advance the march of a primary universal trend?
All that said, it's hard to see how our work will meaningfully bring about a true final state any faster, because we're not likely to accelerate proton decay. Maybe protons decay faster in isolation! Maybe we'll find out that we can poke them just the right way, and it'll be surprisingly useful.
An alien race with no notion of life (as we know it) would see us as nothing more than a natural biochemical reaction process that, as one of its byproducts, manipulated a local environment to split and release energy from atomic nuclei.
There is potential energy locked in multitudes of structures (from chemical bonds, to atomic nuclei). A simple chemical reaction may need a relatively small catalyst to free this energy. For example, a mix of oxygen and hydrocarbons will need a small spark - which can be easily provided through a natural process (e.g. lighting).
To release atomic energy, the catalyst that is needed is a highly complex and organized structure that cannot be achieved with a natural process like lighting, but instead required a reaction that lasted billions of years guided by natural selection. Natural selection progressively and incrementally found improved catalytic structures (for lack of a better phrase) to free previously unachievable energies. But because there is no free lunch, as we're accessing these higher energy levels we're actually accelerating global entropy and speeding up the heat death of the universe.
>By the way, a reaction concerning splitting of atoms is not called a chemical reaction: it's a nuclear reaction.
Well ... yes, but in our example, it is a chemical reaction (i.e. us) that serves as a catalyst to start the nuclear reaction.
I think the idea is that humans, despite being essentially no more than chemical reactions themselves, have developed the power to cause nuclear reactions (through technology).
Nothing. It applies equally well. There is potential energy in free hydrogen molecules that stemmed from the initial low entropy conditions of the big bang that can be freed, for example, in the high-pressure environments in the cores of stars, or human fusion reactors. The act of fusing hydrogen molecules still increases entropy (i.e. we're going from low-entropy to high-entropy). You can keep fusing resulting elements and releasing energy, until you hit iron, at which point, you've reached the most stable atomic nucleus and you won't get any more energy out from fusion (or fission for that matter).
In a superficial way, I suppose, but it's still wrong. Another way to look at it is that life actually tends to a more efficient increase of entropy than otherwise would be expected (when compared to non-living processes). For examples, humans are a complex chemical reaction that has reached the point where it can release energy through splitting of atoms - which raises entropy so much higher than it would be been possible otherwise and completely impossible via non-living chemical reactions.