I think the most profound insight I've come across while studying this particular topic is the insight that information theory ended up being the answer to conserving the 2nd law with respect to Maxwell's demon thought experiment. Not to put too fine a point, but essentially the knowledge organized in the mind of the demon, about the particles in its system, was calculated to offset the creation of the energy gradient.
I found the thinking of William Sidis to be particularly thought provoking perspective on Noether's benchmark work, in his paper The Animate and the Inanimate he posits--at a high level--that life is a "reversal of the second law of thermodynamics"; not that the 2nd law is a physical symmetry, but a mental one in an existence where energy reversibly flows between positive and negative states.
Indeed, when considering machine learning, I think it's quite interesting to consider how the organizing of information/knowledge done during training in some real way mirrors the energy-creating information interred in the mind of Maxwell's demon.
When taking into account the possible transitive benefits of knowledge organized via machine learning, and its attendant oracle through application, it's easy to see a world where this results in a net entropy loss, the creation of a previously non-existent energy gradient.
In my mind this has interesting implications for Fermi's paradox as it seems to imply the inevitibility of the organization of information. Taken further into my own personal dogma, I think it's inevitable that we create--what we would consider--a sentient being as I believe this is the cycle of our own origin in the larger evolutionary timeline.
I like the connection to Fermi. It seems to me eventually there has to be a concrete answer to the following question: Given the laws of physics, and the "initial conditions" (ie the state of the Universe at the moment of the Big Bang), what is the statistical likelihood of advanced (ie technological) civilizations occurring over time, and what is the likelihood that they go extinct (or revert to less technologically savvy conditions)? ISTM there are intrinsic numbers for this calculation, though it is probably impossible for us to derive them from first principles.
>at a high level--that life is a "reversal of the second law of thermodynamics";
Life temporarily displaces entropy, locally.
Life wins battles, chaos wins the war.
>Indeed, when considering machine learning, I think it's quite interesting to consider how the organizing of information/knowledge done during training in some real way mirrors the energy-creating information interred in the mind of Maxwell's demon.
This is our human bias favoring the common myth of ever-expanding complexity is an "inevitable" result of the passage of time; refer to Stephen Jay Gould's "Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin"[0] for the only palatable refute modern evolutionists can offer.
>When taking into account the possible transitive benefits of knowledge organized via machine learning, and its attendant oracle through application, it's easy to see a world where this results in a net entropy loss, the creation of a previously non-existent energy gradient.
Because it is. Randomness combined with a sieve, like a generator and a discriminator, like the primordial protein soup and our own existence as a selector, like chaos and order themselves, MAY - but DOES NOT have to - lead to
temporary, localized areas of complexity, that we call 'life'.
This "energy gradient" you speak of is literally gravity pulling baryonic matter foward thru space time. All work requires a temperature gradient - Hawking's musings on the second law of thermodynamics and your own intuition can reason why.
>In my mind this has interesting implications for Fermi's paradox as it seems to imply the inevitibility of the organization of information. Taken further into my own personal dogma, I think it's inevitable that we create--what we would consider--a sentient being as I believe this is the cycle of our own origin in the larger evolutionary timeline.
Over cosmological time spans, it is a near-mathematical certainty, that we are to either reach the universe's Omega point[1] on "our" own accord, perish to our own, by our own creation, or by our own son's, hands.
I found the thinking of William Sidis to be particularly thought provoking perspective on Noether's benchmark work, in his paper The Animate and the Inanimate he posits--at a high level--that life is a "reversal of the second law of thermodynamics"; not that the 2nd law is a physical symmetry, but a mental one in an existence where energy reversibly flows between positive and negative states.
Indeed, when considering machine learning, I think it's quite interesting to consider how the organizing of information/knowledge done during training in some real way mirrors the energy-creating information interred in the mind of Maxwell's demon.
When taking into account the possible transitive benefits of knowledge organized via machine learning, and its attendant oracle through application, it's easy to see a world where this results in a net entropy loss, the creation of a previously non-existent energy gradient.
In my mind this has interesting implications for Fermi's paradox as it seems to imply the inevitibility of the organization of information. Taken further into my own personal dogma, I think it's inevitable that we create--what we would consider--a sentient being as I believe this is the cycle of our own origin in the larger evolutionary timeline.