The Thermodynamics of Knowledge
A case for relativity
... and the absolute
Relative vs. absolute Solutions (A Rant)
Just taking out the trash…
Absolute solutions are fashionable in societies which have to little to worry about (or think they do), wish to play God, and create the perfect society and / or environment. However, they are also fashionable in societies in dire straits, so maybe that's no criterion.
Perhaps the better one is that they have no other absolute.
Either which way, perfect societies or environments are impossible from the start, since, being composed of thermodynamic entities, all societies must degrade their surroundings and create waste.
Apart from that, as religion has it, humans (or, maybe, all things living and dead), though perhaps having been created in the image of God, nevertheless are flawed creatures - not God themselves.
The same goes for their machines, by the way, one level below.
Which, once again, requires for them to have an absolute outside of themselves, which they could not have created, or would be able to influence.
For such are the consequences from the Second Law of Thermodynamics:
you cannot create yourself,
you cannot preserve yourself,
you cannot return a profit.
So, for something to create you, preserve you, (and, by the way, all life and all lifeless prerequisitions of life as well, especially the vital source and sink, and to do so while creating and preserving itself, that something must have an efficiency of over 100% - and therefore cannot be thermodynamic in nature.
[This is not about the source and sink itself, but the source of the source and sink]
Naturally, a society composed of flawed creatures forced to devour order and create waste, along with their products, is no candidate for perfection; the best that can be achieved is, maybe, let's say, 90% perfection; it's nearer 80, but let's say they already overdid it, allocating exaggerated amounts of resources to the task; thus already creating more than their necessity of waste and resource destruction - usually by outsourcing, which
only kicks the can down the road and
creates an "out of sight, out of mind" dependency of your problems being solved somewhere else.
What happens when you try to perfect the remaining ten per cent? You use up exponentially even more resources, and create exponentially even more waste - it's the equivalent of trying to divide by zero (as in "zero something") - and zero may never be the independent factor!
And you get 90% of the 10% done, leaving 1%.
And so on.
Quite in the short run you will have ruined your society completely; for to treat a 1% problem that may turn up anywhere, you need to prophylactically treat 100% of all concerned everywhere, which means 99% of them unnecessarily; all of which comes at a cost for all (remember: thermodynamics!).
And every other 1% Problem leads to the same - no matter where it turns up.
At 100 problems (which are easy to identify in a quest for perfection), which each concern 100 different 1% fractions of your population, you will have treated each and every entity to 100 times the for that entity necessary amount of treatment - and there is no stopping there.
In the end, your perfect society very rapidly collapses to zero, in a time frame inversely proportional to your effort: the higher the effort for perfection, the faster the collapse into death and decay. And in the further end, there may be not enough resources left (or too much waste accumulated) to ever recover again.
Some random examples:
A society or group of perfect people is either uniform, or composed of 1. Either which way, evolution, and with that change, renewal or reproduction, is dead, and so then is every member of that society in a very close time frame: In evolutionary terms, "perfectly adapted" is synonym to "utterly dependent on external circumstances", which in turn is synonym to "on the road to extinction".
A perfect machine never makes it to the production line, because perfection is unattainable.
Or, more simplistic, reduced and general:
On a yardstick, a random fraction of an inch has to be treated with special attention, forcing the whole yardstick to be treated thus - else perfection is not reached. And this then goes for all other fractions, each independently forcing the whole yardstick to be endlessly treated with this, that, and the other. It becomes instantly overloaded and useless.
Alternatively, you can whittle away the fractions concerned, equally instantly reducing it to uselessness (and again in the end, to zero).
In other words: If you do not keep up a redundancy, you will adapt and streamline yourself into oblivion.
It is unbelievable how fast a society can be destroyed by trying to perfect each and every member, thus instantly - and for thermodynamic reasons - heaping every imperfection thus eliminated in one part of society onto the remaining rest; in the (viciously accelerating) end creating a society of very few, but utterly destroyed members, whose only reason to be still alive is that they are so weighed down, immobilized and handicapped with their accumulated perfection costs, that they are unable to continue perfecting themselves (and others).
Thus we arrive at
The thermodynamics of thinking
The very fact that scientific thinking means destroying falsehoods in order to arrive at truths causes it to be a thermodynamic loss.
And there's more, so they say:
The inherent contradiction, that science means dispelling doubt by doubting the answers given to any question, until proven otherwise through trial, error, and success, means that installing the scientific method as the only way to arrive to conclusions is to install doubt at the very center of societal thinking; which then proceeds to destroy itself in a thermodynamic vicious circle of negativity.
Chopping away all impossible results in the hope of finding the truth assumes that it's there; and this process, being thermodynamic by nature and default, heaps loss upon loss, requiring the allocation of ever more resources - which, in return, have to be available first, as any activity needs resources.
And it most probably is no coincidence that the queen of science, mathematics, stems from a set of axioms which are held to be unprovable, absolute and eternal; or rather, that no human can exist where these do not exist as well (in that world, nothing would stop your physical desk from being inside your physical head at any random time):
One and one can only be two.
Science, therefore, (as is also said of fire, money, and the human mind - all thermodynamic entities or results) "is an excellent servant, but a terrible master".