Tuesday, February 14, 2006

Whitehead, Hansen, Kant, Oh my!

Entropy is not the only constant; my pithy blog title sums up the question of entropy and life's relationship: entropy is life. We are nothing but chaos (I prefer energy to that word); albeit, one that is delayed for a while by our devolving ordered system. I don't think that this perspective is in contradiction to Whitehead's assertion that life has a "teleological tendency towards the realization of order". Furthermore, we inherently contribute to the overall energy of the system. Is entropy a process (per Whitehead) or is it an endemic characteristic? I don't know, haven't thought that through. I will say there is an inherent flaw in the derived belief that the "teleological order-producing aspect of strong processuality implies the "dysteleological" tendency of generalized diffusion from smaller to larger sections". This statement is referring to the global nature of disorder and is the presumption of mankind's ability to discern a noumenon, that is a simple problem of granularity, and not an actual unknowable. There is a dysteleological tendency in any process reasoning as you widen the scope, but it is not a result of a greater universal disorder.

Mr. Hansen's PhD thesis would place it in the same bucket that time is handled in. Go to chapter 4, about 55% of the way down, he notes "there seems to be no such way of deriving anything to do with macroscopic properties such as heat and temperature, or at least that this would require that we first manage to construct such properties from our "first principle" of process metaphysics -- that is, in fact, that we manage to perform a somewhat detailed construction of the range of properties of observable nature." That is what my first post on entropy was doing.

Whoa, one should really not write these kinds of things without a few drinks to clear the pathway of reason. Or else you suddenly find yourself between two mirrors, as noted in an earlier post, and you don't laugh, you just get confused. But, hey, it's Valentine's Day, what better day to be confused on, right? Either way, this is well out of Kant's realm of metaphysics.

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