Words&Dirt

“Wolf Larsen was unconscious, but it was a matter of minutes for the fresh air to restore him.  We were working over him, however, when he signed for paper and pencil.

‘Pray do not interrupt me,’ he wrote.  ‘I am smiling.’

‘I am still a bit of the ferment, you see,’ he wrote a little later.

‘I am glad you are as small a bit as you are,’ I said.

‘Thank you,’ he wrote.  ‘But just think of how much smaller I shall be before I die.’

‘And yet I am all here, Hump,’ he wrote with a final flourish.  ‘I can think more clearly than ever in my life before.  Nothing to disturb me.  Concentration is perfect.  I am all here and more than here.’

It was like a message from the night of the grave; for this man’s body had become his mausoleum.  And there, in so strange sepulture, his spirit fluttered and lived.  It would flutter and live till the last line of communication was broken, and after that who was to say how much longer it might continue to flutter and live?”

––The Sea-Wolf, by Jack London, pg. 235

“This new thermodynamics (sometimes called homeodynamics) lets us begin to glimpse the path from matter (gradient breakdown) to mind (gradient perception)––from energetic to informational ‘self’-organization.  We put ‘self’ in quotes here because, in fact, complex systems are ‘other’-organized, precisely not ‘self’-organized.  The tendency of systems to organize comes from the gradients in their immediate surroundings, not from their own internal components.  The informational structure of life, carried in DNA, has become self-sustaining via reproduction.  But memory exists as well in fully nonliving systems such as vortices organized by rotational pressure gradients.  These jump to new states and new values that depend on their history.  Thus it seems to us that, without invoking any vitalism or mysticism or spiritualism, we can recognize in ourselves a ‘purpose.’  This purposefulness is an offshoot of the thermodynamic tendency to come to equilibrium.  Complex systems, life included, tend to arise in order to bring their gradient-rich surroundings to equilibrium.

In the eyes of many Christians, the darwinian revolution left nature purposeless, at least on paper.  Darwinians, faced with a personal Creator as the only conceivable source of purpose, hastened to agree.  But physical purpose is more subtle than that.  From the thermodynamic vantage point, purpose has a physical aspect.  It is no more uniform than memory, which manifests itself in bodies, genetically, and brains, neuronally––and even in machines, magnetically.  And like memory, purpose––with its orientation toward the future––has a thermodynamic genesis.

Life is thermodynamic.  A continuous whirlpool downstream of Niagara Falls has a name: ‘Whirlpool.’  We give names to things, like species and hurricanes, that keep their identities––at least for a time.  The formation of stable identities aids the thermodynamic process of gradient reduction.  The highly heritable members of a species, like other cyclical and complex thermodynamic agents, provide stable vehicles of degradation.  The cycling selves of life survive in order to reduce the energetic and material gradients that keep them going; they covet and tap into these gradients to survive long enough to reproduce.  As natural selection filters out the many to preserve the remaining few, those few ever more efficiently use environmental energy to ‘purposefully’ reduce their gradients.  The key point is that living and nonliving ‘selves’ come into being to reduce gradients naturally.  The reproducing self of biology is a higher-order cycle whose antecedents can be inferred from the cycles of the nonliving world.  Nucleotide replication and cell reproduction do not emerge from nowhere.  They are born in an energetic universe from thermodynamic tendencies inherent in nature.”

––Acquiring Genomes: A Theory of the Origins of Species, by Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, pg. 48-50