Chapter 3.7 - The Ergod 
Part Three - Value Many scientists had known for decades before Bertalanffy that living systems somehow avoid the inevitable degradation suffered by physical systems, according to the second law of thermodynamics. Instead of approaching thermodynamic equilibrium (complete chaos and maximum entropy, living systems maintain themselves in a high state of order (or information) far from equilibrium. Earlier thinkers had called this a "dynamic equilibrium," but Bertalannfy called it "flow equilibrium." In his 1932 book Theoretische Biologie, he described living systems as open systems that exchange matter and energy with the environment.
More important than the new terminology, Bertalanffy in 1940 described what was happening in a way made famous five years later by Erwin Schrödinger in his book What is Life?, namely that energy is not enough, it must be energy with low (or negative) entropy, or what Bertalanffy correctly called "free energy.".
Bertalanffy wrote:
In open systems we have not only production of entropy due to irreversible processes, but also import of negative entropy. This is the case in the living organism which imports [consumes nutrients with] complex molecules that are high in free energy. Thus, living systems, maintaining themselves in a steady state, can avoid the increase of entropy, and may even develop towards states of increased order and organization.
In his 1945 essay What is Life?, Schrödinger would say that "life feeds on negative entropy." Schrödinger described this as "order out of order" that distinguishes life from the "order out of chaos" exhibited by many complex physical systems studied today.
Ilya Prigogine and his collaborator Isabel Stengers titled their 1984 book Order Out Of Chaos. In it, they focused on physical systems far from equilibrium which exhibit the flow of matter and energy from the environment through an open system. Prigogine called them "dissipative structures" and developed the non-linear thermodynamics needed to describe them mathematically. Prigogine thought these dissipative systems showed "self-organizing" characteristics similar to those of biological systems. He also thought their irreversibility could provide a new definition of time beyond classical Newtonian physics, which makes collisions between microscopic particles reversible.”We are all deeply conscious today that the enthusiasm of our forebears for the marvellous achievements of Newtonian mechanics led them to make generalizations in this area of predictability which, indeed, we may have generally tended to believe before 1960, but which we now recognize were false. We collectively wish to apologize for having misled the general educated public by spreading ideas about determinism of systems satisfying Newton’s laws of motion that, after 1960, were to be proved incorrect...”Sensitivity to initial conditions was in fact known long before modern chaos theory and complexity theory. James Clerk Maxwell noted in the 1860's that even if two molecules were adjacent to one another in a hydrodynamic flow, they might find themselves in random places in the container after relatively short mixing times. He wrote:
When the state of things is such that an infinitely small variation of the present state will alter only by an infinitely small quantity the state at some future time, the condition of the system, whether at rest or in motion, is said to be stable; but when an infinitely small variation in the present state may bring about a finite difference in the state of the system in a finite time, the condition of the system is said to be unstable.The real world is only approximately classical mechanical (obeying Newton's dynamical laws at all scales). At the small scales of atomic and molecular physics, the world is quantum mechanical. There is nothing corresponding to deterministic chaos in quantum physics. Deterministic chaos requires continuous motion to produce mathematical singularities and exponential non-linearity. Despite unpredictable and spontaneous "quantum jumps," the discrete states of the quantum world are more regular and stable than their classical analogues. Indeed, the long-term stability of quantum structures in their "ground states" is astonishing, as is the complete indistinguishability of elementary particles, which gives rise to extremely non-intuitive statistics. Finally, the long-term stability of quantum cooperative phenomena is evident in the ability of biological macromolecules to maintain (by error detection and correction) their information content. The desire to describe randomness and chance in the world with deterministic chaos resembles the view of Adolphe Quételet and Henry Thomas Buckle that statistical regularities in various physical and social phenomena are evidence of an underlying determinism. Is the motivation similar to that which seeks an intelligent designer behind biological evolution? It seems that the "antipathy to chance" observed by William James at the end of the nineteenth century is alive and well in the twenty-first.
| Chapter 3.7 - The Ergod |
Chapter 4.2 - The History of Free Will |
| Part Three - Value |
Part Five - Problems |