The author analyses thermodynamics in the context of life almost half as deeply as Bataille, G.C. Williams or Odum yet neglects to put the same rigor to dissecting the moral qualifiers they throw around like benevolent, joyful, horror and evil.
Who's to say that degrading exergy is strongly or weakly aligned with good or evil, or that good and evil are opposites? Is degrading exergy entirely orthogonal to good and evil, like the gnostics articulate? These are open philosophical questions that the author would do better to contextualise if this essay were to be more than an incomplete survey.
JonathanRaines · 5h ago
> "According to the laws of thermodynamics, all that exists does so solely to consume, destroy and extinguish, and in this way to accelerate the slide toward cosmic obliteration"
Bit of a leap from "heat cannon, of itself, pass from one body to a hotter body"?
justonceokay · 3h ago
Also it misses the most important thing: thermodynamics is what lets our complicated processes exist in the first place. The mental model I use is that when you first drop food coloring into water there is low entropy. After an hour it is mixed—high entropy. But in the middle is when you get the complicated swirling structures. In the cosmic sense those swirls represent stars and galaxies and life.
Thermodynamics giveth, not only taketh away
wolvesechoes · 4h ago
I think philosophers should start actually learning about things there are writing about and base their conclusions on.
Who's to say that degrading exergy is strongly or weakly aligned with good or evil, or that good and evil are opposites? Is degrading exergy entirely orthogonal to good and evil, like the gnostics articulate? These are open philosophical questions that the author would do better to contextualise if this essay were to be more than an incomplete survey.
Bit of a leap from "heat cannon, of itself, pass from one body to a hotter body"?
Thermodynamics giveth, not only taketh away