for - question - entropy definition of life - investigate further - entropy definition of life

question - I'm not fully appreciating his explanation. This requires further investigation - This physical explanation of life appears to be aimed at showing that the hardware and software aspects of life work together to dissipate physical energy - Is he saying that life's purpose is to accelerate the heat death of the universe?

46:00 Social anxiety as "disordered attention" (HealthyGamer) where we fixate on certain signals too much. It warps incoming information. Positive signals are filtered out and attention is fixated on negative information.

54:00 "Distorting the flow of information" (also see Mihaly jump) Information is internal based rather than external (because attention is internally directed rather than externally).

Reminds me of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi his notion of psychic entropy where consciousness is essentially disordered. One can say that social anxiety contributes to entropy.

29:00 We structure our consciousness around goals; else we fall into entropy (Rian Doris)

https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/4767325/does-the-entropy-of-a-chatgpt-sentence-match-that-of-the-output

Syndication link: https://boffosocko.com/2013/09/26/entropy-beauty-melody/

One of the toughest parts about these systems is that while they're relatively easy to outline (evidence: the thousands of 500-1000 word blog posts about zettelkasten in the last 3 years), they're tougher to practice and many people have slight variations on the idea (from Eminem's "Stacking Ammo" to Luhmann's (still incomplete) digital collection). Far fewer people are sticking with it beyond a few weeks or doing it for crazy reasons (I call it #ProductivityPorn, while Scott has the colorful phrase "bubble graph boys").

For those who visit here, seeing discrete cards and ideas, videos, or examples of how others have done this practice can be immensely helpful. While it can be boring to watch a video of someone reading and taking notes by hand, it can also be incredibly useful to see exactly what they're doing and how they're doing it (though God bless you for speeding them up 😅).

This is also part of why I share examples of how others have practiced these techniques too. Seeing discrete examples to imitate is far easier than trying to innovate your way into these methods, particularly when it's difficult to see the acceleration effects of serendipity that comes several months or years into the process. Plus it's fun to see how Vladimir Nabokov, Anne Lamott, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Bob Hope, Michael Ende, Twyla Tharp, Roland Barthes, Kate Grenville, Marcel Mauss, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Joan Rivers, Umberto Eco, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Raymond, Llull, George Carlin, John Locke, and Eminem all did variations of this for themselves. (This last sentence has so much entropy in it, I'm certain that it's never been written before in the history of humanity.)

And isn't everyone tired to death of Luhmann, Luhmann, Luhmann? You'd think that no one had ever thought to take note of anything before?!

While my own approach is a hybrid of online and offline techniques, I've gotten long emails from people following my Hypothes.is feed of notes and annotations saying what a useful extended example it is. Of course they don't see the follow up that entails revision of the notes or additional linking, tagging, and indexing that may go on, but it's at least enough of an idea that they understand the start of the practice.

(Incidentally, I wrote most of this using a few cards from my own system. 🗃️✂️🖋️)

As in entropy?

"In the Zettelkasten, there is a note that contains the argument that disproves all assertions on all other notes. But this note disappears once you open the Zettelkasten. That is, it changes its number and relocates itself, making it impossible to find. A joker."

Ha! A great meta card to have in one's system!

Now that we're digitizing the Zettelkasten we often find dated notes that say things like "note 60,7B3 is missing". This note replaces the original note at this position. We often find that the original note is maybe only 20, 30 notes away, put back in the wrong position. But Luhmann did not start looking, because where should he look? How far would he have to go to maybe find it again? So, instead he adds the "note is missing"-note. Should he bump into the original note by chance, then he could put it back in its original position. Or else, not.

Niklas Luhmann had a simple way of dealing with lost cards by creating empty replacements which could be swapped out if found later. It's not too dissimilar to doing inventory in a book store where mischievous customers pick up books, move them, or even hide them sections away. Going through occasionally or even regularly or systematically would eventually find lost/misfiled cards unless they were removed entirely from the system (similar to stolen books).

Greta Thunberg on COP26

In which Greta calls bullshit on the capitalist entropy machine’s attempts to spin the culture of learned helplessness, trained incapacities, and bureaucratic intransigence that is designed to maintain the status quo while pretending to be the world’s saviours through philanthropy, social entrepreneurship, and greenwashing.

via Twitter

Person - definition of entropy

• Clausius - entropy from Greek "Transformation"
• Leon Cooper (1968) - lost heat
• dictionaries - unavailable energy
• Arieh Ben-Naim - missing information (or uncertainty)

The purpose of this textbook

Book on statistical thermodynamics that use information theory, mentioned in Chapter 1.

The process of moving ions and other atomic/molecular substances across the cell membranes without the need of an input of energy. Instead, it relies on the system to grow during entropy.

Ghavasieh, A., Nicolini, C., & De Domenico, M. (2020). Statistical physics of complex information dynamics. ArXiv:2010.04014 [Cond-Mat, Physics:Physics]. http://arxiv.org/abs/2010.04014

Bernard Stiegler analysiert die Beziehungen zwischen Wissen und Technik, und zwar ausgehend von Derrida und Heidegger. Vieles wirkt auf mich wie eine Art Parallel-Unternehmen zu Latour, bei dem ich bisher nie einen Hinweis auf Stiegler gefunden habe. Auch bei Stiegler geht es darum zu erklären, warum Staaten und Wirtschaft nicht auf die Klimakrise reagieren. Wenn ich es richtig sehe, dann verbindet er das Konzept der différance mit einer Art bioökonomischem Ansatz.- Bemerkenswert ist auch seine Marketing- und Medienkritik und generell sein Versuch, Denkgewohnheiten in eine Beziehung zu den Mechanismen des neoliberalen Kapitalismus zu setzen.

【能量视角下的GAN模型】本文直接受启发于Bengio团队的新作《Maximum Entropy Generators for Energy-Based Models》，作者给出了GAN/WGAN的清晰直观的能量图像，讨论了判别器（能量函数）的训练情况和策略，指出了梯度惩罚一个非常漂亮而直观的能量解释。此外，本文还讨论了GAN中优化器的选择问题。http://t.cn/EcBIwqJ

True of almost everything in life.

paper 提出了个 VAE-GAN 模型，不过正如作者自己说的可能是 GPU 资源不够，图像质量并不太如意，而且用的是 FCN 不是 CNN；主要用 Entropy 来量化评估生成变现。

This is what Edgar Orrin Klapp meant when he wrote in his 1986 Overload and Boredom: Essays on the Quality of Life in the Information Society that “meaning and interest are found mostly in the mid-range between extremes of redundancy and variety-these extremes being called, respectively, banality and noise” (). Redundancy is repetition of the same, which creates a condition of insufficient difference, while noise is the chaos of non-referentiality, or entropy. In a way, these extremes collapse into each other, in that both can be viewed “as a loss of potential … for a certain line of action at least” ().

There is perhaps something of "the real" here, as well. Volker Woltersdorff (2012, 134) writes that: The law of increasing entropy is a concept of energy in the natural sciences that assumes the tendency of all systems to eventually reach their lowest level of energy. Organic systems therefore tend toward inertia … Freud identifies the death drive with entropy … within his theory, the economy of the death drive is to release tension."

Adam Phillips clarifies the death drive: “People are not, Freud seems to be saying, the saboteurs of their own lives, acting against their own best interests; they are simply dying in their own fashion (to describe someone as self-destructive is to assume a knowledge of what is good for them, an omniscient knowledge of the ‘real’ logic of their lives)” (2000, 81, cf. 77).

It's interesting that the author chooses to emphasize the distinction between extropy as an opposition to entropy, but instead as a metaphor. However, would extropy not be the opposite of entropy metaphorically as well? Scientific definition aside, entropy is defined as the universe's tendency towards chaos in all manners of the word meaning constant expansion and disorder. Extropy is the universe's tendency towards the idea of a 'singularity' (discussed in "The Technological Singularity") so essentially the exact opposite? The universe's tendency to follow "intelligence, functional order", etc. toward a single point of "posthuman" where we've gone beyond human capability?

This is what Edgar Orrin Klapp meant when he wrote in his 1986 Overload and Boredom: Essays on the Quality of Life in the Information Society that “meaning and interest are found mostly in the mid-range between extremes of redundancy and variety-these extremes being called, respectively, banality and noise” (). Redundancy is repetition of the same, which creates a condition of insufficient difference, while noise is the chaos of non-referentiality, or entropy. In a way, these extremes collapse into each other, in that both can be viewed “as a loss of potential … for a certain line of action at least” ().

There is perhaps something of "the real" here, as well. Volker Woltersdorff (2012, 134) writes that: The law of increasing entropy is a concept of energy in the natural sciences that assumes the tendency of all systems to eventually reach their lowest level of energy. Organic systems therefore tend toward inertia … Freud identifies the death drive with entropy ... within his theory, the economy of the death drive is to release tension."

Adam Phillips clarifies the death drive: “People are not, Freud seems to be saying, the saboteurs of their own lives, acting against their own best interests; they are simply dying in their own fashion (to describe someone as self-destructive is to assume a knowledge of what is good for them, an omniscient knowledge of the ‘real’ logic of their lives)” (2000, 81, cf. 77).

De hecho, algunos estudios sugieren que la organización es una buena manera de acelerar la desorganización, particularmente en el caso de la vida (https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-new-thermodynamics-theory-of-the-origin-of-life-20140122/)

May be this the reason why life "goes against" entropy?

Who cares most about the 20-year rule? This is an ideal that appeals to some, but in practice even the most zealous adherents can't picture what this looks like in some concrete way-- except in the most traditional ways: physical paper journals in libraries are tangible examples of the 20-year rule.

Until we have a digital equivalent for data I don't blame people looking for tenure or jobs for not caring about this ideal if we can't provide a clear picture of how to achieve this widely at an institutional level. For digital materials I think the picture people have in their minds is of tape backup. Maybe this is generational? New generations not exposed widely to cassette tapes, DVDs, and other physical media that "old people" remember, only then will it be possible to have a new ideal that people can see in their minds-eye.

I agree with the key component mentioned here, but I feel the term data entropy is an unhelpful crutch.

I'm not sure what this really means and I don't think data entropy is a helpful term. Poor practices certainly lead to disorganized collections of data, but I think this notion comes from a time when people were very concerned about degradation of physical media on which data is stored. That is, of course, still a concern, but I think the term data entropy really lends itself as an excuse for people who don't use good practices to manage data and is a cover for the real problem which is a kind of data illiteracy in much the same way we also face computational illiteracy widely in the sciences. Managing data really is hard, but let's not mask it with fanciful notions like data entropy.