PART TWO
Entropy Of Milieus Of Human World
It is a hypothesis, which is tough to accept, even when there are enough evidences all around us to substantiate it, if not corroborate it. This hypothesis says, ‘Disorder and entropic chaos is far more creative energy. You are better off only when you land in the probabilistic multiplicity of uncertainty and completely taken to randomization of eventualities by the typhoon of disarray and anarchy.’ This hypothesis somehow seems to be what we all live with but seldom care to decipher a pattern of.
This hypothesis seems like a humdrum of an insanely stupid mind, who is in the habit of mouthing gibberish insinuations just for populist consumption. In lighter vein, it seems like what intellectualism is all about! But then, people have since ages seem to have spoken of such nonsensical causality to draw attention of mindless millions about shades of Reality we all live in and with. The idea is, this hypothesis looks like close to what thermodynamics says about energy and its situationalism. Understanding the basics of energy and its intuitive mechanism helps a lot in understanding not only the societal space around us but also the systemic stupidities of our inner-selves.
The state of physical realism is that the total energy of the universe is constant. The more important factual physicality is that everything tends to become less organized and less orderly over time. No doubt, even this physical reality of ‘entropy’ is open to debate but it surely is available for causal philosophizing. It needs to be insisted here that this causal-philosophizing is for restrictive purpose of paradigm-building for a very metaphoric-mechanism; having utility largely for arriving at a dimension which otherwise may not be possible. This process has derivative utility only!
Energy being constant is a huge hypothesis for human social realism. It provides great insight into humanity’s incessant enterprise to construct and destruct the world around for increasing conveniences. What it means in general understanding is, we humans have this capacity only to devise the usages of the energy already available and still it remains what it was. We convert the potential energy into kinetic energy and this very moment entropy sets in. No usage-device of any advancement can use the energy 100% and part of it goes into the system.
The hypothesis is, as energies are used for creating order within a mechanism, part of it, often a considerable part; is always lost in the process and this is the disorder which goes into the system or the immediate environment where the mechanism operates. As energy can never be destroyed, the disordered energy, lost in the mechanism is stored as entropic energy in the system. The construction process releases the entropic energy which is stored in the system as destructive energy. In simple words, the process or mechanism of ‘order’ itself releases the entropic energy which is stored as ‘disorder’ in the system, within which the process works.
This happens as energy is constant; it is always conserved but takes different shapes – from potential to kinetic and part going to energy fields (systemic). The other aspect of energy is that isolated systems gravitate towards thermodynamic equilibrium, which means a state of maximum entropy or disorder. This means, every system and its mechanism and processes tend to become less organized and less orderly over time. So, greater the time-period of ‘order-building’; larger is the propensity of ‘disorder-building’ in the system. Given that systemic efficiency has a larger impact on the efficiency of the process and mechanisms within it, entropic energies in the Long-Run would ensure recurring disorders in the overall working-efficiencies of order processes.
We shall talk about the idea of ‘Long Run’ later and before that, we need to know in detail this element of entropy and inevitability and omnipresence of disorder in all orders. We can say, there is this Rule Of Causality in the cosmos as well as in the milieus, which plays around us, muffles us and makes us sing and dance to its tunes. It is this rule of causality, which unleashes its embedded energy and we, as individuals are run into actions and behaviors by this energy; either in inertia, by choice or by status quo.
If we take the liberty to enter philosophy into this physical law and move to see its application in societal and personal life-living, we can have a sound perspective of how with passage of enough time, everything tends to become more chaotic, confusing and conflicting. This includes, personal lives as well as societies and cultures. The simple thing is; a ‘Probability’ eith in our personal lives or in the lives of societies and culture, has its own energy of ‘Causality’ and even when this probability is playing its energy on us, at one time/space situation, the other aspect of this probability, usually the inverse of it, or the flip side of the probability, is still there, though in static energy form. So, a ‘Heads’ in the toss of coin plays out some causality or set of it for us, even as the probabilities and related causalities of ‘Tails’ of the same coin is lying latent in the same milieu and for the same person. The trouble is, mostly, people accept only the kinetic energy of ‘Heads’ playing at the moment for us and refuse to accept the inevitability of the static or latent energies of the ‘Tails’ of the same coin of life, which always has the ‘Dual’ causalities of twin probabilities. In this dialectics of causalities, it is always the ‘thesis’ which is upfront and observed, even as the very causality of thesis automatically creates its antithesis, which is always ignored. But, it cannot be wished away. This ignored energy of ‘anti-causality’ is very often the entropic energy that remains uncared and in long run shapes up a more entropic synthesis, as dialectic chain completes its cyclical course.
If you accept ‘Heads’, or it happens to you, by choice or by inertia, its energies lead your actions and behaviors but never ever believe that the static or latent energy of ‘Tails’ is not playing its own energies of causalities of probabilities. The coin is never only heads or tails, it is always both. If ‘Heads’ is ‘Good’ for me and I am consciously seeking it for my benefit, then ‘Tails’ is also trailing me and its causalities are also there in the same milieu (Often with inverse probabilities), where Heads is operating for me. This is the way Reality works for all. The dialectics is omnipresent and omnipotent. Good and bad are always operating in its entirety and that is why, throughout our lives everyone of us is in the midst of the dualism, which in its holism is affecting us.
In our subjective consciousness, we fail to see and accept the holism of the dualism playing every second for us and this is our core trouble. The dualism mothers loads of hypocrisies all of us dump into the milieus and add to the already overdose of 3Cs – Conflict, confusion and chaos. Science has confirmed – The vacuum in the space is not ‘Nothingness’. There always are ‘vacillations’ in the vacuum and these vacillations shape up the ‘Somethingness’ in the causalities of rainbow of probabilities.
This partial and lopsided perspective of Reality, which believes in only one aspect of dealing with energies of causalities is the prime culprit of adding more and more entropies in personal lives as well as in the ambient milieus we live. There is a famous quote of Dalai Lama, which points out this hypocrisy and lack of holism in average men and women. He said, we spend most precious part of our youth in earning big moneys and wealth, compromising with our naturally available health and peace of mind. And, rest of our lives in later youthfulness, we spend the same money and wealth to get back the lost health and peace of mind. What this statement points out is the common practice of hypocrisy that humanity has always been associated with. We are always very partial and lopsided in using energies in our life-living, always ignoring the very nature and make of the physics and biology of energy in its holism. When we chase Heads of a coin, we do not care for the energies of the latent energies of the causalities of Tails. Therefore, later, when the entropies of the uncared and ignored energies of Tails hot us hard, we leave the Heads and spend the energies of attainments of the causalities of Heads to minimize the onslaught and pathology of the Tails. This leaves us as the most stupid engineers and managers of energy operations and processes of life-living.
What we are also trying to hypothesize and philosophize is the probability of we all standing in the midst of a time-space situation, where entropies have become too unmanageable because they have been there since quite a long time. The contemporary humanity seems to be standing in the time-space of ‘Long Run’ and this has ensured that accumulated entropies have disordered the system of our world and life-living beyond the point of probable return and restoration.
Now, the key question is; what we can accept as ‘Long-Run’, where entropy starts taking its toll in such a way that it is irreversible? It is crucial to know that because, only then we can gauge the extent and intensity of the disorder and entropic energy in our systems. If the period is short, we have a system, which has low disorder and low entropic energy, and if the period is long one, we are in a chaotic and catastrophic system, tough to get restored, if not impossible.
Consider the scientific facts available about the life of our Sun and the universe we live in. The Sun is the source of life on Earth that’s why, its end means end of all things, living or non-living on the Earth. Now, we all know, our dear Sun came into existence some 4.6 billion years ago. The scientists are affirmative that after 4 billion years, the Sun shall be so hot that all life on Earth shall vanish. Some however have belief that such a stage can come even after just 2.5 billion years. The universe however has longer life. It came into being almost 14 billion years before and shall survive about 35 billion years more.
What does this mean? It seems, we are halfway through our entire life period on this earth! Is that a period enough to be termed as ‘Long-Run’ of time? It seems, looks like a possibility. Even if we consider the entire life-period of universe, we are past one quarter of it. So, can we assume, we, humanity as a whole, have passed Long Enough time on earth to make the hypothesis true that – Everything tends to become less organized and less orderly over time. Do we need to align ourselves to this possibility that as we are halfway through, we must all understand and accept that we live in times when our mechanisms of order and construction has spewed out reasonably high amounts of ‘Disorder and Destruction’. This is a systemic trouble; a procedural predicament that we humans cannot wish away. Can we?
What this causal philosophizing on the thermodynamics realism means for humanity in general and in particular? It is not that this hypothesis about ‘Long Run’ and ‘Entropy’ is what we need to feel scared about. The only insinuation is that somehow, in our zeal to maximize joys and comforts, this probability of causality about systemic entropy is not even being accepted in sidelines. We at least need to bring this issue to debate and discussion at the center of all talks about development. Thinking of development is always good but being oblivious of entropy that the enterprise of energy for development is unleashing fast in the milieus is call to calamity. It seems so.
Stephen Hawking said, ‘A frightening possibility is that intelligent life is not only common, but that it destroys itself when it reaches a stage of advanced technology. That’s why we have not met aliens as yet…’
Yes, this is disorder and entropic energy at its best. What Hawking is probably hinting at is the systemic causality of development and entropy, which all humans need to understand and accept. The intuitive mechanism of energy, in and around us must be accepted by all; at least our decision-makers.
We always see a lot of chaos, confusion, conflict, catastrophe around us and more often, these destructive energies are so potent and omnipresent that we feel frustrated and often start believing that our systems have gone so much wrong and humanity is doomed. Somehow, as human brain/mind is only 15 percent genetic and majorly 85 percent milieu-driven, major part of this chaos, confusion, conflict percolates to individual consciousness and collective unconscious.
In all nations, be it developed or developing, the systemic entropies make a larger population feel frustrated and in anger of the system. May be, the human system and milieus have become so large and their working has become so complex in long march of humanity that level or content of entropy has risen very high, unleashing loads of conflicts and confusions. We all think, our leaders or those in control of resources and authority have misused their briefs to create such a chaos and conflict. We almost always fail to see the larger picture. The entropy is systemic. We all contribute to it. It is there because it has to be there. There is no wishing away. And as time passes, every next day brings about more entropic energy into play in the system. We think and believe that they are people-specific troubles, unleashed by politicians or others but the fact seems like it is all systemic entropy.
This is cardinal principle of physical realism of the universe. More we grow in time and space, larger becomes our systems and mechanisms for excellence and order and more and more grows the disorder and entropy in the system. We need to accept, we have come halfway mark. Too much we have constructed for the destructive energy to be under control and within comfort zone. Scientists warn, the forces of nature and evolution has ceased to be and human intervention has come a long way. The entropy somehow also balances developmental energies but as natural entropy is non-operative, it is human entropy into the system, which has gone out of limits and is set to go berserk.
We have become a complex living conundrum. We all see it around. We all have ourselves discovered the rules of physicality. Still, we do not wish to accept it. It is interesting how we all rather prefer the energy of entropy in our lives and the life-enterprises. See, for example, we say it to ourselves and everyone, ‘If you always do what you have always done, you will always get what you have always got. Stretch it out, leave the comfort zone and dabble into the pond of uncertainty to catch a larger and better fish…’. This ‘maximization’ motto of life-living attainments and wellness is sure invite to more entropic energies in the system. Everyone is adding loads of it in the milieus and system. The sanity of survival is pumping in loads of pollution of elements of entropic insanity into the human system.
We all add entropy into the system. Intelligence and all good societal benchmarks of goodness add a hell lot of entropic energy into the system and it is only natural that systemic health is hitting abysmal low. This is what Hawking says when he predicts, intelligent races are suicidal in tendencies… Why only living beings, our dear Sun is also becoming more intelligent as it is burning more fuel and getting hotter by the day. And around 2.5 billion years from now, it shall become so intelligent and ‘good’, would warm up so much that it would end all lives and things on earth, finally burning itself in 4.5 billion years. Brilliance beyond limits of ‘utility’ is not only a ‘futility’ rather it is calamitous and catastrophic.
Now, coming back to where we started, ‘Disorder and entropic chaos is far more creative energy. You are better off only when you land in the probabilistic multiplicity of uncertainty and completely taken to randomization of eventualities by the typhoon of disorder and chaos…’ Yes, this is what fuels ‘intelligence’. Being intelligent, of course in contemporary established benchmarks of millions of years; is riding the entropic energy and fueling all such constructive probabilities and options for human consumption which would result into more and more entropic eventualities.
John Stevenson said it in his ‘one life’ discourse, ‘Evolution is a chain of accidents’, call it ‘probabilistic multiplicity of uncertainty, completely taken to randomization of eventualities’…
Loren Eiseley said very rightly, ‘It was the failures who had always won, but by the time they won they had come to be called successes. This is the final paradox, which men call evolution.” That’s why, John says, evolution is a stupid engineer…’
The randomization of eventualities of the entropic energy established through ages of evolution, happily benchmarked by humanity as ‘successes’ is what we all know as entropic mechanism of intuitive physicality but fail to see and accept. This has to be understood, accepted and remedial measures taken. This paradox and hypocrisy about what humanity considers and places sky high as ‘intelligence’ having equitable elements of stark stupidities need to be understood and accepted. Many awakened and evolved people are already distancing them away from such intelligence and moving back to simplicity of life-living goals. There are small bunch of people all over the globe who have understood this dualism of Reality that a coin never comes only with Heads or tails. Both sides of the coin have their energies of causalities and they shall unleash in simultaneous expressions. Entropy cannot be wished away as thermodynamic equilibrium is primary ‘Rule of Causality’. Mortality, complete annihilation and inevitable extinction is what we all are heading towards and we all are actually augmenting the speed of arriving at the finality of eventuality by being more ‘intelligent’. As we have talked earlier, mortality is the inevitability of finality of all energy enterprises that cosmic causalities are engaging in. Human body-mind media and its own media of consciousness is naturally auto-designed and auto-oriented for this finality. That is why collectively, sanity is never a possibility. There are enough indicators already in contemporary world, which show us brazenly how we are hastening our own finality of mortality. We shall talk about it.
Stephen Hawking calls for this remedial step and terms it as humanity needing to enter into a new phase of ‘self designed evolution’, rather than random and accident-designed evolution, in which we the intelligent humans will be able to change and improve our DNA. This shall enable us to take humanity even to other planet, long after our Sun dies…’
This is however still a bit far away. It shall take time before humanity comes with a technology to create ‘super-humans’ who shall then write a different history of humanity. But till then, we all poor normal humans have to survive and sustain in this chaos and conundrum. So, we have to understand this entropic energy and also the ‘success-benchmarks’ that we all follow without scant understanding of what and how they are and what randomization of further entropic eventualities they lead us to.
There are huge entropic footprints of what has been labeled as human success and it is big time perceptible and impacting the overall sanity, system and order of the human world and life-living. There is even some sort of acceptance too of their debilitating impact on our world but in our madness for more success and more attainments, humanity is happily ignoring them. The biggest example of this happy ignorance and even wishful denial is the crisis of environmental degradation. On one hand, there is a section of humanity who takes it as biggest looming threat on survival of humanity, even while majority of population, especially the nexus of politician-corporate are consciously downplaying the threat. Same is the situation with nuclear weapons, the way global hotspots are handled and also the very casual way nuclear threat is put in global political discourse.
Consider a small but very powerful entropy that humanity handles very casually. Globally, around 1.4 million people are killed in road traffic mishaps every year. This is around 3800 people every day are dead in road accidents involving different vehicles. Moreover it is estimated that 20-50 million people are injured, huge many of them disabled every year in road mishaps. This is global trouble and yet neither the public nor government agencies take this seriously. People happily drive irresponsibly and authorities have little inclination to design and implement road safety and driving sanity. On the other hand, globally, automobile sales are considered the most crucial indicator of growth in an economy. The vehicle manufacturers globally are vying madly for technological edge in their vehicle manufacturing to launch new state of the art vehicles on the road. Huge number of new vehicles land on road every year as even governments are pushing for auto sales to show off their growth figures and health. However, very little, almost negligible is done on the front of road infrastructure, road safety, traffic regulation, driving sanity and course correction to minimize accidents. The technology is used even at rising vehicle cost to augment look of the vehicle, power and other comfort features but even when technology is possible, no investment and care is assigned to those technological and other features in vehicle that could ensure road infrastructure, road safety, traffic regulation, driving sanity and course correction to minimize accidents.
There are so many areas of human life-living where this partial perspective of acceptance of reality is so accentuated that they are destroying sanity. The growing dependence of average human on technology even in daily lives, the ever increasing complexities in relationships, the growing levels of stress in life-living and as small as food and other lifestyle choices, etc are glaring examples of how humanity has always cared for only the ‘Heads’ of a reality and seldom bothered to accept and accommodate the flip side of ‘Tails’ in its march for growth and betterment. The tragedy is that even when in contemporary times, we have enough factual data available about how our poor and lopsided choices, behavior and actions are leading us to calamitous causalities, humanity in general is not interested in learning any lesson.
Just take a glimpse on this seemingly very irrelevant social data, which has not even caught imagination of the mainstream consciousness. We have this piece of US data about changing food behavior of millennial and young generation. A Harvard study says, total amount of money spent on food away from home has risen 94 percent since 2003, with average American household spending average of 3000 dollar per year on dining out. The study says, only a miniscule 15 percent of Americans said they loved to cook, 50 percent said they hated to cook and 35 percent were lukewarm to the idea of cooking. Market research says, in 1984 over 70 percent of meals eaten were cooked at home which has fallen to less than 60 percent in 2014.
There is already question in air in USA as, ‘Is The Home Kitchen Dead’, as analysts predict that online food ordering and delivery would grow by 20 percent per annum between now and 2030. The US online food market orders is said to be set to reach 365 billion dollars from current 35 billion dollars in just 11 years.
Now place these factual data with health warning handed out by experts who believe, majority of human diseases and health issues are related with food we take. There is a growing call by experts to observe sanity in what we eat and how we eat. Since long, almost all researches on longevity of human life have clearly state that it is the home food, cooked with local resources, consumed fresh and taken in loving family gathering that is at the root of long life. In sharp contrast, breakfast, lunch and dinner are being taken, away from homes, ordered from outside or packaged foods are replacing freshly cooked food. It is also stated that food is taken in very unhealthy ways as millennial are said to be growingly eating alone, away from homes and in runaway mode.
As we said, we may not be having enough data on emerging trends in human cultures, lifestyle choices and societal behaviors but we surely have sound indicators to warn us that we are all failing in singular front and this is – we are ignoring the holism of our life-living Reality and taking care of only partial aspect of ‘successes’ in growth and attainments. In our zeal to maximize the attainments and proceeds of ‘Heads’, we are happily ignoring the causalities of the probabilities of ‘Tails’ and thus in a definitive way, augmenting the innate and systemic entropies. In a way, we are ourselves being the facilitator of our own troubles and the final destruction. And then, if we assume that such a life-living milieu can have the possibility of sanity, we are simply not helping ourselves. That is why this is high time we take it to our personal and individual enterprise to begin the right process in our personal domains to revert back to ways and initiate novel ones to install and sustain sanity in personal life-living. Sanity is impossibility in collective spaces.
**
Entropy Of Human Consciousness
We need to assess first, how our consciousness seems to have been designed and how our brain states communicate with body structures, using which media. There is enough scientific knowledge available now and it is a huge sense of satisfaction that modern quantum science has focused very intently on the idea of ‘Consciousness’.
There is a primary hypothesis that is now being widely accepted in new millennium of scientific mindset, which underlines that humans are very closely associated with their close cousins, the chimps and other mammals as huge majority of our genes are common. We humans are different and way ahead of all other species of complex organisms primarily because we have highly advanced brain states. That exclusivity of large and complex brain structure with all its yet un-deciphered mechanism and processes make us stand on top of the pyramid of lives on Earth. It is this complex brain that has made possible a ‘Consciousness’ in we humans, which is rare and probably exclusive in this universe. But, now we have known that this exclusivity is good in many senses but also happens to be the primary cause of almost all troubles that humanity has had and continues to add more. This is interesting…!
When we look at and accept life-living realism and ‘I’ or self positioned in them from the modern and path-breaking concept and realism of ‘Consciousness’, we have ease in internalizing the ideas of the ‘Media’ that our body-brain uses for ‘Communication’. We also get to feel less revolted by this precarious realism that ‘I’ or self operates simultaneously in different layers of consciousness and almost certainly, our unconscious and subconscious selves dominate almost over 90 percent of our thoughts, behaviors and actions. It is a miniscule percent of thoughts behaviors and action that ‘I’ or self takes as ‘Conscious Self’ that is fully aware and in control of them. This stupidity is our design, we cannot help.
There are three major aspects of the realism called Consciousness, as science has so far deciphered. The ancient Oriental spiritualism had hinted about them many thousand years back but they could not clearly know the Rules of Causality. It could be because realism has always been there and available for those who cared. Truth is singular and already there, we humans cannot create truth or realism but always can decipher and unravel it. This science of consciousness and cognition and the causality among them is deciphering many aspects of that singular realism but still evolving and has not yet reached a definitive stage. Still, the three aspects we are going to discuss here that science has successfully deciphered shall help us big way in understanding Consciousness. The three aspects of consciousness we list as:
1. Entropic: There is this seemingly very valid and probably self-verifiable interpretation of consciousness as an entropic situation and expression of human brain. In the long, varied and potentially complex process of evolution, human brain states probably developed and evolved to such an intricate and multilayered system that reached a criticality of entrenched entropy. This entropic ecosystem of advanced brain engendered consciousness that stood exclusive to humans as no other complex organism had this level of ‘Criticality of Entropy’ of such a complex brain. What does this mean? What we can make out of this scientific yet ambiguous idea of Entropic Consciousness?
We all know that entropy itself is a complex idea yet in simple terms, we accept entropy as measure of order or disorder in a system. A high entropy system is one with higher measure of disorder. This disorder is broadly expressed in terms of the system’s higher propensity towards randomization. This disorder may in broad sense be accepted as something that makes the overall optimal efficiency of a system uncertain. So, when we say that human brain has far more and greater entropy than any other animal, we are essentially saying that human brain states have greater range and repertoire of mental awareness and cognitive capacities. The core hypothesis is that the consciousness we humans have that makes us aware of ‘I’ or self, as distinct and exclusive from others, is because of our brain evolving to unparalleled complexities, thus having a critical level of entropy that in turn engenders consciousness that we have. Other animals, especially higher organisms also have consciousness but as their brain is less complex and therefore the entropy level is much below the criticality that human brain has, only humans have a consciousness that finds expression in much higher and deeper awareness of ‘I’ or self.
Now, as we have understood and can accept the idea of entropic consciousness, we need to look at the modern and contemporary explanation about ‘I-Awareness’ or what we may call levels of self-awareness. It is accepted by scientific experimentation that consciousness, as it was engendered and happened because of ‘entropy-expansion’, it is designed and wired to a higher state of randomization. Why? It is explained that thermodynamics theory has established that a closed system is always naturally aligned to optimize the system entropy. That is probably why human consciousness that is the outcome of entropy-expansion has this innate and intrinsic orientation and propensity for entropy-optimization. This means, human consciousness, in its innate and intrinsic character is given to higher randomization. Science accepts entropy-expansion as the ‘defining property’ of consciousness but also admits that it has to be automatically followed by entropy-suppression to bring about system reorganization or systemic settlement.
So, what we can conclude for ease of understan