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<DIV>Eshel--I dove into your paper and found it exhilarating. But this is what it drove out of me. Hopefully I'll dive deeper and farther in future days. Onward--Howard</DIV>
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<P class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt; LINE-HEIGHT: 150%"><FONT face="Times New Roman">Eshel—I know I may sound obdurate, perverse, and ignorant, but it’s really time, in my opinion, to toss the laws of thermodynamics out the window—both of them.<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>First of all, the conservation of energy is a great idea and has done extraordinary things for science.<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>But it is an unproven assumption, one too big for me to grapple with here.<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>Let’s just admit that it’s not necessarily true and move on.</FONT></P>
<P class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt; LINE-HEIGHT: 150%"><FONT face="Times New Roman"> <o:p></o:p></FONT></P>
<P class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt; LINE-HEIGHT: 150%"><FONT face="Times New Roman">Second, the concept of entropy is upside down and backwards.<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>So let’s look for something that concept obscures.<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>What is the creative, forward-moving force of the cosmos, the principle that milks opportunity from catastrophe and carries the cosmos forward like a salmon going upstream?<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>No, let’s cancel that image.<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>The universe IS the stream, and it is going uphill, not downhill.<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>In fact, it is MAKING the hill as it steps upward.<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>Why and how does it pull this off?</FONT></P>
<P class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt; LINE-HEIGHT: 150%"><FONT face="Times New Roman"> <o:p></o:p></FONT></P>
<P class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt; LINE-HEIGHT: 150%"><FONT face="Times New Roman">An organism doesn’t take a low entropy energy—a formless, random energy—and turn it into a high-entropy energy—an even more formless and random form of movement (which, at heart is what all energy is--movement).<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>An organism does just the opposite.<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>It takes an already formful and organized form of energy and adds additional form and function, additional Rube Goldberg gadgetry that makes the energy travel through a far more complex, ordered, repeatable, upgradeable, and exultant path.<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>Now let’s strip the anthropomorphist poetry from that sentence and call the path more ornate, more intricate, and, to use a word you’ve wisely put into play, but one whose meaning is still mysterious, a path that has more meaning, a path that triggers more compressed and repeatable processes.</FONT></P>
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<P class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt; LINE-HEIGHT: 150%"><FONT face="Times New Roman">Life feeds off the screams of atoms ripped apart in the heart of the sun.<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>Those screams are streams of photons.<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>Streams of photons are highly ordered.<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>A photon alone is a mystery we’ve scarcely begun to fathom.<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>Why does it pulse?<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>Why does it wave?<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>Why do any waves wave?<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>What keeps the photon wobbling with amazing precision as it travels a straight line?<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>Where does the precision come from?<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>Why does the photon continue traveling?<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>What strange form of trapped motion is this that wobbles with precisely the same frequency for vast distances and never deviates in direction?<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>If this is the random universe of entropy, then:</FONT></P>
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<P class=bullets--quadrafoil style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt 0.5in"><SPAN style="FONT-FAMILY: Wingdings">v<SPAN style="FONT: 7pt 'Times New Roman'"> </SPAN></SPAN><FONT face="Times New Roman">Photons should not have a precise wavelength—their wavelength should shudder randomly</FONT></P>
<P class=bullets--quadrafoil style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt 0.5in"><SPAN style="FONT-FAMILY: Wingdings">v<SPAN style="FONT: 7pt 'Times New Roman'"> </SPAN></SPAN><FONT face="Times New Roman">Photons should not be organized in precise quanta</FONT></P>
<P class=bullets--quadrafoil style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt 0.5in"><SPAN style="FONT-FAMILY: Wingdings">v<SPAN style="FONT: 7pt 'Times New Roman'"> </SPAN></SPAN><FONT face="Times New Roman">Photons should sometimes blob, sometimes glop, and should slither and slur in ways that make then unrecognizable from one second to the next</FONT></P>
<P class=bullets--quadrafoil style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt 0.5in"><SPAN style="FONT-FAMILY: Wingdings">v<SPAN style="FONT: 7pt 'Times New Roman'"> </SPAN></SPAN><FONT face="Times New Roman">There should be nothing at all so regular and ordered, so repetitive and predictable, that we can call it light and reduce it to photons</FONT></P>
<P class=bullets--quadrafoil style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt 0.5in; tab-stops: .5in; mso-list: none"><FONT face="Times New Roman"> <o:p></o:p></FONT></P>
<P class=bullets--quadrafoil style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt; TEXT-INDENT: 0in; tab-stops: .5in; mso-list: none"><FONT face="Times New Roman">We are limited in being able to understand life by the fact that the best evidence we have on its origins come from some streaks of iron that seem to have been metabolized 3.85 billion years ago, and by the fact that the first life we know already had cells, genomes, communication, and social organization.<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>Taking the highly ordered rays of sunlight, selecting a small slice of their spectrum (another mark of organization, formfulness, and non-randomness) then twisting it into a chemical cycle, using it the way a waterwheel uses a stream—but ever-so-much-more complexly and creatively—is a remarkable feat.</FONT></P>
<P class=bullets--quadrafoil style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt; TEXT-INDENT: 0in; tab-stops: .5in; mso-list: none"><FONT face="Times New Roman"> <o:p></o:p></FONT></P>
<P class=bullets--quadrafoil style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt; TEXT-INDENT: 0in; tab-stops: .5in; mso-list: none"><FONT face="Times New Roman">Using it to maintain the vast society of molecules that is a single cell is a miracle of vast proportions—highly anti-entropic.<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>Using some of that photon-chemical-machinery-fueled-energy to translate motion from one medium to another to another and to many others, that’s anti-entropic, too.<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>Using some of that energy to communicate and keep a social organization going, using some of it to communicate to find new food, using some of it to communicate to make chemical war with enemies, using other batches of that photon-based energy to make each generation’s contribution to the pyramid a succession of billions cyanobacterial generations manages to build, a stromatolite, all that is negentropic.<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>Jeesh, I shouldn’t be using this vocabulary.<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>Believe me, words based on entropy are scientific poison.</FONT></P>
<P class=bullets--quadrafoil style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt; TEXT-INDENT: 0in; tab-stops: .5in; mso-list: none"><FONT face="Times New Roman"> <o:p></o:p></FONT></P>
<P class=bullets--quadrafoil style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt; TEXT-INDENT: 0in; tab-stops: .5in; mso-list: none"><FONT face="Times New Roman">Then there’s the shit that life-forms excrete.<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>We know that some bacteria attack a batch of food with phenotypes, morphs, that are born to gorge themselves.<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>We know that their shit is poisonous to them.<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>We know that other morphs are born to eat shit and love it.<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </P>
<P class=bullets--quadrafoil style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt; TEXT-INDENT: 0in; tab-stops: .5in; mso-list: none">What these bacteria excrete, I do not know.<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>But I suspect it’s something useful.</P>
<P class=bullets--quadrafoil style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt; TEXT-INDENT: 0in; tab-stops: .5in; mso-list: none"> <o:p></o:p></P>
<P class=bullets--quadrafoil style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt; TEXT-INDENT: 0in; tab-stops: .5in; mso-list: none">Why?<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>Because I know that the dung of any life form is highly processed stuff.<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>It’s the opposite of random.<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>And I do know that other life forms rapidly find a way to exploit it.<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>We are all shit eaters, Eshel, because even shit is gorgeous in its way.<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>My shit feeds bacteria.<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>So does yours.<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>For microorganisms human shit is gourmet food.<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>Judging from the way flies congregate around a bit of shit, I suspect they find the stuff we excrete to be candy and mannah too.<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN></P>
<P class=bullets--quadrafoil style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt; TEXT-INDENT: 0in; tab-stops: .5in; mso-list: none"> <o:p></o:p></P>
<P class=bullets--quadrafoil style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt; TEXT-INDENT: 0in; tab-stops: .5in; mso-list: none">We’re shit eaters like the rest.<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>We love cheese, vinegar, and beer—all micoorganismic shit.</P>
<P class=bullets--quadrafoil style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt; TEXT-INDENT: 0in; tab-stops: .5in; mso-list: none"> <o:p></o:p></P>
<P class=bullets--quadrafoil style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt; TEXT-INDENT: 0in; tab-stops: .5in; mso-list: none">But that’s the secret of the universe.<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>Each form of shit is a gourmet dish awaiting the evolution of its eaters.<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>Electrons and protons lose their independence and are imprisoned.<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>Their imprisonment makes atoms, atoms of new wonders, hydorogen, helium, and lithium.<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>From a torture comes a miracle.</P>
<P class=bullets--quadrafoil style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt; TEXT-INDENT: 0in; tab-stops: .5in; mso-list: none"> <o:p></o:p></P>
<P class=bullets--quadrafoil style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt; TEXT-INDENT: 0in; tab-stops: .5in; mso-list: none">Atoms are shredded in the hearts of suns.<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>From that vast destruction light comes.<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>Life eats star-shit of two kinds.<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>It finds good use for the shit spewed out when stars go through their agonies and die.<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>That shit comes out in an extraordinarily ordered and extraordinarily constrained way.<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>It comes out as 89 new forms of atoms.<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>A mere 89 new forms in a cosmos with gazillions of particles?<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>That ain’t random.<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>That ain’t disordered.<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>And that ain’t a move backwards.<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>It isn’t entropy.</P>
<P class=bullets--quadrafoil style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt; TEXT-INDENT: 0in; tab-stops: .5in; mso-list: none"> <o:p></o:p></P>
<P class=bullets--quadrafoil style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt; TEXT-INDENT: 0in; tab-stops: .5in; mso-list: none">Look what life has done with the resulting 92 natural atoms and the molecules that self-assembled along the way.</P>
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<P class=bullets--quadrafoil style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt; TEXT-INDENT: 0in; tab-stops: .5in; mso-list: none">Every old form’s shit is another new form’s delicacy.<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>Every catastrophe that besets what’s old is a step toward a new kind of wonder.</P>
<P class=bullets--quadrafoil style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt; TEXT-INDENT: 0in; tab-stops: .5in; mso-list: none"> <o:p></o:p></P>
<P class=bullets--quadrafoil style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt; TEXT-INDENT: 0in; tab-stops: .5in; mso-list: none">This is a cosmos of miracles.<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>But the word miracle implies that only God can understand these things, and that we humans are passive admirers doomed to sing god’s praises.<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>Sorry, God does some inexcusably vicious things—like the Holocaust and his current torment of <SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>Israel.<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>We are scientists.<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>In other words, we are the best god has been able to do up until today.<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>It’s our task to understand the incomprehensible, to turn yet more energy into a higher-level summary of what this cosmos is about.<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN></P>
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<P class=bullets--quadrafoil style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt; TEXT-INDENT: 0in; tab-stops: .5in; mso-list: none">The cosmos, in my opinion, builds on the unfolding of the implications of her axioms.<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>And she builds on self-reflection—on the power of new summaries of herself to become new sorts of processes and things.<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>Life is the cosmos’ project of self-reflection lifted to a new degree.<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>A genome is a portrait of the cosmos painted in her own materials, summarizing the past in order to predict…and build…a future.<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>Consciousness, passion, religion, and art are summaries of the cosmos too, summaries that become the building blocks of whole new kinds of things.</P>
<P class=bullets--quadrafoil style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt; TEXT-INDENT: 0in; tab-stops: .5in; mso-list: none"> <o:p></o:p></P>
<P class=bullets--quadrafoil style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt; TEXT-INDENT: 0in; tab-stops: .5in; mso-list: none">That’s how the cosmos works.<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>Turn an implication into something hard and fast.<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>Use that something hard and fast to summarize the past and to predict a future. Use it to digest and to condense. Then use the product, use the bit of mind-or-matter-shit , to build, just as the dung beatle turns a bit of feces into a treasure trove or as a termite builds a palace with its own small bricks of shit.</P>
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<P class=bullets--quadrafoil style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt; TEXT-INDENT: 0in; tab-stops: .5in; mso-list: none">Then spring a really big surprise, another implication turned into a wildly new reality. Toss in something really big and unbelievably new—like particles, waves, and gravity.<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>Like planets, suns, life, and “dark energy”. We are the newest generation of<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>those who yank the implicit into the hard and fast.<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>We are the newest generation of cosmic mirrors helping an entire universe admire herself<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>in our glass.<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>We are the latest past-crunchers metabolizing a vast history to predict what’s next and what with our efforts we can cause to be.<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>Every miracle is understandable.<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>And the task of understanding is up to you and me.</P>
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<P class=bullets--quadrafoil style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt; TEXT-INDENT: 0in; tab-stops: .5in; mso-list: none"><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt; FONT-FAMILY: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-ansi-language: EN-US">Entropy is not a tool of understanding.<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>It’s a forced denial of all we see.</SPAN></P>
<P class=bullets--quadrafoil style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt; TEXT-INDENT: 0in; tab-stops: .5in; mso-list: none"><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt; FONT-FAMILY: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-ansi-language: EN-US"></SPAN> </P>
<P class=bullets--quadrafoil style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt; TEXT-INDENT: 0in; tab-stops: .5in; mso-list: none"><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt; FONT-FAMILY: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-ansi-language: EN-US">Onward--Howard</SPAN></SPAN></FONT></P></DIV>
<DIV><FONT lang=0 face=Arial size=2 FAMILY="SANSSERIF" PTSIZE="10">----------<BR>Howard Bloom<BR>Author of The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History and Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind From The Big Bang to the 21st Century<BR>Visiting Scholar-Graduate Psychology Department, New York University; Faculty Member, The Graduate Institute<BR>www.howardbloom.net<BR>www.bigbangtango.net<BR>Founder: International Paleopsychology Project; founding board member: Epic of Evolution Society; founding board member, The Darwin Project; founder: The Big Bang Tango Media Lab; member: New York Academy of Sciences, American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Psychological Society, Academy of Political Science, Human Behavior and Evolution Society, International Society for Human Ethology; advisory board member: Youthactivism.org; executive editor -- New Paradigm book series.<BR>For information on The International Paleopsychology Project, see: www.paleopsych.org<BR>for two chapters from <BR>The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History, see www.howardbloom.net/lucifer<BR>For information on Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century, see www.howardbloom.net<BR></FONT></DIV></BODY></HTML>