- Prospect 1850 -
Going Astray since 150 years (and a look into the future)
While contemplating on the fact that three of the world’s most influential men (on modern times)
- Karl Marx, Charles Darwin, Rudolph Clausius -
were contemporaries at that historic time, 150 years ago.
And neighbors, in a way,
The was an observer:
(Alexis de Tocqueville 1805-1859)
Contemporary of
Charles Robert Darwin 1809 – 1882
Karl Heinrich Marx 1818 - 1883
Rudolf Julius Emanuel Clausius 1822 - 1888
Note the dates.
Ex nihilo nihil fit
(Nothing happens by itself)
"The LORD giveth, and the LORD taketh away"
- "European" man before about 1870.
"The Lord can stay where he is. I can make it all by myself"
- "European" man after about 1870.
Vs.
"God created Heaven and Earth"
"Yes, but how?"
A collection of assorted & associated quotes
and interpretations
[In no particular order]
On God & the World - Physics & Religion
"Just as Christians believe in three things that are only one, the Trinity, so I believe in two things that are one and the same, [...] I believe in matter, which is both force and mass at the same time, [... ] how shabby and empty it is to say, 'I believe in one god'"
- Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Suspicion
God or no God - there is a fundamental mechanism in the universe, an organizing power, which in itself is The Source of All Life on Earth and the entire Cosmos.
And the opposing force, the mechanism which messes things up through mixing them up, the one that destroys that order, we call the Devil.
[ Gr. "Diabolos": The confounder, confuser, slanderer;
God separates, but the Devil mixes ]
Unfortunately, we belong to the realm of the latter.
Or as they say:
Heaven has strict criteria concerning admission and remanence, while Hell is open to anyone, anytime.
Selling your soul for the end of science
“Oh, that I would know
what holds the world
together at the core!”
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), in:
Faust: The Tragedy; Part One
That Faustian Wager with the Devil:
Faust:
If, to a moment, I should say:
’You are so beautiful! Please stay!’
Then bind me into chains you may,
I’ll gladly throw my life away.
Mephisto:
You sure? For there'll be hell to pay.
The satanic reversal
(turning things on their head)
"Foul is fair, and fair is foul"
- From The Tragedy of Macbeth
by William Shakespeare:
The consequences of logic without presumption or boundaries, or justifying the means by the aim: Enforcing the prophecy.
Interpreting Reality
After 150 years of steaming ahead, it may be time to re-visit the fundamentals.
That may not change the physical reality, but perhaps our perception of it.
“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered.
And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute.
History has stopped.
Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”
George Orwell, 1984
The End and the Beginning of Creation
Once "the science" is "settled", all hell breaks loose - and the torment of the "endless present" (Orwell, above) begins, which has to be artificially enhanced to make it bearable - if only in more benign times.
Darwinian perfection - which in itself cannot be objectively defined here on Earth - leads to extinction when the environment changes.
On the other hand
"Inspired by the staggering beauty of America's native* wilderness, many early American writers rejected the Baconian view that man held dominion over nature: their subsequent works heralded the birth of the environmental movement."
- The Trustees of Reservations, in: The Ecologist, Journal of the Post Industrial Age, Vol. 11, No. 3, 1981, Page 135
* "Untouched by human hands" - and therefore of pristine WEALTH!
From an economic point of view, the result of human activity is always zero, as the assets and liabilities split up in the production process will always cancel each other out; and physically, the result is a loss.
So where, then, is the profit?
In the Beginning
So here we go: The Science of Creation
The physical basis of ecology and economics is that all living beings, humans, machines, and most movements of dead matter on this and any planet's interactive surface, deplete, for thermodynamic gain, and according to the laws of thermodynamics at a loss, an energy potential and entropic gradient which is provided for, and then replenished, by the force of gravity. For free.
The two processes of grading and degrading, of gravity and thermodynamics, can sometimes be intermixed; but without that gift free-of-charge at the beginning of every economic chain, nothing would be possible.
After an economic reset, new money is either handed out for free, or on credit; under whatever pretense. Often, the initial loan is backed by real estate; and this, too, has to be provided for free, initially - by gravity. It can then be claimed by humans, but not paid for (to whom and with what?) - and then sold or mortgaged.
But it does not stop there; at the beginning of any further economic chain of action, again, there has to be something, if not everything, for free - be it energy or any other type of resource; provided for, again, in the end, by the workings of gravity.
Within these prerequisites, thermodynamic action (i.e. physical work) can take place, forming debts and assets, but always at a physical loss; and because of that loss, you cannot start with nothing - the result would be Dante's hell.
You cannot escape, for the laws of thermodynamics apply.
That is the difference to economics, which runs on sub-zero credit or negative money.
'Relax,' said the night man,
'We are programmed to receive.
You can check out any time you like,
but you can never leave!
( The Eagles, Hotel California )
Next: the 1850 roll call
Charles Darwin
Around 1850, the irrefutable interpretation of Charles Darwin's observations meant that humans - and, for that matter, the world as such - had not, as previously believed, been created by the will and in the image of an almighty creator, not even in foresight and over time - or, indeed, as lesser descendents and reflections of Olympian Gods; but that they were, more or less, the random (and, by the way, temporary) product of an ongoing development, whose future course is and was impossible for its creatures to predict.
With that, the people of the western world, up to then safe in their self - interpretation as Children of God, were, in their majority, suddenly lost as babes in the woods, with God as their benign creator being replaced by blind chance; who was now to give them their daily bread?
Karl Marx
Along came Karl Marx, who had been studying the effects of modern industrialization on human society, and told them that THEY will. This was their chance; they would, from now on, with the help of modern science and industry, not only feed themselves and all, but literally become God; their human labor, he said, ignoring the steam engines and water mills being deployed everywhere in rapid acceleration, was the Creator of All Values; and therefore always had been.
So humans, now on their own, having finally taken the crown of creation, would be, and always had been, the creators of everything. Who else?
And this secular world view they called "scientific".
Industrial mill owners heartily agreed, and immediately fighting broke out as to who should reap the profits stemming from this work, with poor Rudolph Clausius muttering in the background that, according to his own and slightly different scientific findings and interpretations, machines - and by implication, humans as well, for they work on the same thermo-dynamic principles, burning carbohydrates for movement - could not even produce a surplus; but on the contrary were forced to destroy it.
Who?
Rudolph Clausius
Unfortunately, Clausius' further calculations pertaining to something he called "entropy", or the inability to do work, were hard to interpret (and possibly technically incorrect), and his views were taken with a great deal of salt; but his laws of thermodynamics, so the enlightened said, surely applied to everything in the universe (they do not) but their own actions (they do); for if one is Creator and King on the way to world domination, then one must be the one exemption, n'est pas?
Even if one is really nothing but the result of natural selection, and therefore no exception at all. But humans always have been the one, so far their churches agree.
But how can one be a Creator of Value, if the very act of “creating value” devalues what was once valuable?
Follow-Up:
(a lengthy rant)
on a very personal note
Many decades ago, I found myself leafing through the a volume of Karl Marx's "Das Kapital" from a bookshelf of a friend.
And then and there I came to my very own personal conclusion:
Marx’s theory is self-referential right from the start, and based on unproven claims; especially in the "mathematical formula".
And with that you can dump it.
It even exudes a tang of astrology and black magic, as abstract things constantly change their shape, content and appearance.
I never looked back or believed anything (theoretical) about it after that: high school knowledge, theoretical proof. You can (or can not) prove anything and everything that way; the result is not right nor wrong, but worthless.
And a society built on his principles, at least up to now, did not get very far economically.
So why was everyone gong along with it? And still is?
Marx, as were his comrades, was a truly excellent journalist at describing the misery of the workplace; but his idea of finding the cause and answer in a few weeks (as he famously boasted to his London-based friend and financier Friedrich Engels in 1851) led him to endless, never to be finished ramblings; and as I suppose, this was because of that initial mistake (these ramblings right here, on the other hand, are self-repetitive).
He then died, as far as I know, after spending the rest of his life writing about his theory, and it was never really finished - because it doesn't work. You cannot prove your starting point by assuming it. It's not feasible. If you close one end, it rips open another.
Apart from that, I believe that capitalists and communists both make the same false assumption, which leads both societies to misery, one this way, one the other:
They assume an added value (or 'profit') through work that does not exist.
Then they drown in debt.
My standard example: The tree and the chair
You can make a chair out of a tree, but not a tree out of a chair.
The tree is therefore objectively worth more than the chair - even plus the waste; among other things, because of the energy which is lost to the environment in the work process.
This process is irreversible; putting all of its parts together again (i.e., investing even more work!) does not result in the original tree, but in a pile of warm bits of wood and sawdust.
See physics, first and second laws of thermodynamics.
But it's more than just the 'material' energy; strangely enough, information is lost as well, along with order; though a chair may seem more complex than a tree, the damage done to the latter cannot be reversed, only healed by new (external) input - like sunlight; i.e., by growing a new tree.
Thermodynamic work is *always* associated with a loss of energy, of order and complexity:
Burning carbohydrates, in effect, reduces (or rather oxidizes) them to soda water, H2O + CO2; which is a far less complex set of molecules, even when ignoring the internal structure (order) of those carbohydrates themselves, or the external structure they built, such as wood.
And you always produce waste - which then must be disposed of, again, at an (extra) cost. Even the initial production of that tree requires far more energy input than is later contained in it.
Subjective vs. Objective
In conclusion, that the chair is worth more to you than the tree is subjective.
Otherwise you would not have invested (and thereby destroyed) even more resources to (and by) work.
A bark beetle might disagree with you, and a termite not care; but that subjective value assessment is why you are ready to pay more than for the tree alone, to destroy that tree and make a chair, the former of which, incidentally, must be given to you, or to someone up the commercial food chain, for free - or the process could not even start.
Again, the second law: There shall be no perpetuum mobile, or eternal movement without loss.
Yes, you may economically go into monetary debt to start the process (which by the way you cannot get out of in sum), but you cannot possibly start a physical process with nothing, as material debt, or something less than nothing, is physically impossible.
Now, a tree is a living thing; but even something as relatively simple as smelting copper (or iron, which also needs de-oxidized carbon or hydrogen), degrades an energy potential as well, losing energy - which the process cannot generate - to heat up the environment, thus increasing entropy; let alone the fact that these metals themselves have to be created by gravity for free first, along with the energy potential and the heat sink or interstellar space used in the work process.
The whole process of work, following the laws of nature, is necessarily ridden with loss. The "added value" is actually a "subtracted value"; and the debts and assets derived from the process are always 1:1 (that last bit is undisputed).
“Capitalists” and “communists” only argue about who gets what from what; who the debts, who the assets, and who the chair. Who gets stuck with the waste. And who owned the tree.
Result and profit of the work process
This is the results of work processes, which we cannot live without: destroyed resources, monetary debt and assets, (polluting) waste, and a product which is worth less than the addition of all these - because of the inevitable loss of energy, order and complexity, also known as the inevitable rise of entropy, inherent in a continuous thermodynamic process we call life.
[Which by the way begs the question, what happens if you return the energy which was extracted from the environment in 100,000 years and stored as fossil fuels, per year, back into that same environment - ultimately as heat? Does it heat up your surroundings? And what happens when you do the same with pristine but limitless amounts of energy generated by the destruction of matter in atomic power plants?
It by the way also begs the question how much of this work is truly dedicated to accessing resources to destroy, and how much, in modern economy, is dedicated to nothing more than taxing that destruction, in other words: to generate debt that can be leveraged - usually against the person thus taxed.]
Apart from that, this is the fate of ALL living beings:
In order to live, they have to destroy their basis of life - which is necessarily given to them ‘for free’, as no thermodynamic work process can maintain itself, according to the ‘second law’ governing it, see above; this is ironclad and without exception.
For evidence, see your breakfast.
This necessary loss must be compensated for by a non-thermodynamic, non-work process that provides you with your "daily bread" - up front, and free of charge.
All 'profit' is generated far BEFORE your work begins and is “only” harvested by you.
As stated above, capitalists and communists (again taken as pars pro toto) only quarrel over the distribution of the harvest - and who (or what) has to do the harvesting.
Were all of this otherwise, if work were truly profitable, no working person would be poor (and all machines would run on their own surplus).
Instead, working entities have to be compensated for their loss; and, as debts and assets start out 0/0, on credit - which only works in the abstract fantasy world of money and power.
These monetary compensations for the loss of thermodynamic work capacity (increase in entropy) have to be translated into, or take the form of, real, tangible, physical assets, such as food, water and shelter; which, in the real world (and for those very same reasons), cannot be originally arrived at through thermodynamic work.
And thus, in the real, physical world, at the beginning of every economic chain there must be something, if not everything, for free; which brings us to religion, on the one hand - and back to physics.
The primary physical process
The original, primary physical process that makes your life possible, at all, is called gravity. It is an uncontrollable property of dead matter, to which you contribute to with the dead weight of your body, because (and arguably as long as) you are a part of this earth.
Gravity not only sustains you, it created you - you and your surroundings that brought you forth. It accounts for just about everything except matter itself. Cost-free & in abundance, it is the physical source of life, the eternal fountain of youth and renewal.
This does no mean that natural surroundings are not very, very harsh, and that reaping those gains is not life-threateningly difficult. It is, always has been, and most probably always will be. Which might be the reason why humans, if things get too easy (at least as a trend), take leave of their senses and descend into megalomania.
Which is sad, because the ensuing destruction usually throws them back at least 2-3 generations, to never ever regain what they have lost in the process.
The (future) results of delusion
It didn’t happen all at once, but gradually, and over the fictional space of 150 years. And it’s accelerating.
Having lost - or gotten rid of - their Creator, and with that, all inhibitions, "western" society, in a kind of tizzy of fear and fury, set out to conquer and change the entire world (if not the universe), which was now in their responsibility to do - in the responsibility of a species which was brought forth, or so they themselves believed, by this very world by a mixture of random chance and forced adaptation.
And their churches, having equally lost their way - and their raison d'etre - after a moment of uncertainty, quickly jumped onto this new bandwagon, and once again took the lead, now in a very worldly sense; humans are now the sole creators of every condition, including their own; all else stays the same.
Hooray.
As a result of this mental mayhem, again in a strange combination of delusion and terror (and, most of all, contrary to their own better knowledge and observation), these societies now interpreted the world as a place where chance and chaos reign - they do not - in which humans are called upon to bring order and stability - which they are not, and can not, for they are thermodynamic entities; and, driven by their own hubris and desperation, they proceeded to embark on the construction of a new Tower of Babel, a momentary expression of which is the multilingual mobile phone combined with unfettered global migration.
And very quickly, in true and fiendish consequence, humans then turn on themselves; for, as wayward products of random disorder, they are of course flawed, and always have been; but this is no longer acceptable, for they themselves are now responsible as creators, and thus called upon to restore a new cosmic order, an order that had never been - when they were not in charge.
And so the call goes out, at first, to self - optimize, then to become perfect, a perfect human being, or something that cannot be; then to eliminate all wrong.
First, this duty calls for body jewelry, then plastic surgery, then brainwashing, mindbending and social engineering; then, as their success is not sufficiently lasting, for panic-driven genetic engineering (the others could be quicker!) and hooking your flawed mind up to the new, man-made electronic grid, bypassing your equally flawed body.
Where will it go?
But if they now think that from now on, and in future, they (finally!) will have absolute power over their lives, and their bodies, they will find that, in true satanic reversal (mistaking collective power over themselves with individual power over themselves), they will, within a generation, have less power over either, than ever before in living memory.
In the end, this only narrows the pool from which natural selection, which goes on relentlessly, takes its material, driven by the imperturbable force of gravity as it is; this will lead to humans practically throwing themselves out of the race for their own future; for, as they know, but will not accept, the word "perfect", both in biology and engineering, is just another way of saying "terminal".
What they also will not accept, is that you cannot be in two contradicting states at the same time, and the choice is not one to make - except, of course, while in the state of denial.
For at the end of that day, humans, as every thermodynamic life form on every world in the universe, will not have created themselves, cannot feed themselves, and can not sustain and renew themselves; but are as dependent as ever on external sources - no matter how much they will be able to control them.
They are, most especially, dependent on gravity to continue to do its work - and thereby take its time.
Far from having become true creators, for remaining dependent on free handouts, things that are given (and taken) without costs except for those of extraction, humans have become tyrants, and therefore slaves to each other again; for the second law of thermodynamics applies to them as it applies to all.
From complacency through existential panic and hubris, they will have gone once full circle; all they have to do is replace their old, static interpretation of their world by the new, dynamic one, and apply their 'rules for all the world' on themselves, and accept they are part of it.
End of rant.
Some attempt at clarification:
The second law of thermodynamics
allows for different formulations:
One statement is that, in a thermodynamic system, a difference in temperature can only equalize, but never spontaneously develop or increase.
But, since such differences in temperature not only do exist in reality, but are in fact a precondition for the course of thermodynamic processes, and on the other hand cannot arise thermodynamically, this requires a mechanism that exists outside of thermodynamics and its laws; one that spontaneously develops or increases these necessary and existing differences in temperature.
The same can be formulated for energy and entropy gradients.
The monopolar force that creates temperature, energy, and entropy gradients outside of the laws of thermodynamics and thus makes them available to thermodynamics is called gravity.
As necessary as the thermodynamic conversion of energy is: without gravity it would not exist, nor would there be material bodies to convert it; there would also be no order or negative entropy (negentropy), without which life is impossible (and which by the way cannot be negative).
Gravity thus forms the prerequisite for everything that exists beyond pure matter; and is - directly and indirectly - also the basis of all movement.
Conclusions
The physical basis of all ecology and economy consists in the fact that all living beings, people, machines and generally all moving matter on the interactive surface of this planet - according to the laws of thermodynamics with a loss - exploit an energetic and entropic gradient, thereby reducing it towards zero; one which ultimately is generated and maintained directly, and indirectly, and free of charge, by gravity, whereby gravity creates and maintains further necessary gradients, equally free of charge: immaterial ones, such as 'above' and 'below', and material ones, such as the separation of earth, water and air.
The costs arise, very real, in their reduction.
So once again:
Assets and debts in an economy always correspond 1 : 1 (the debts of one are the assets of another, in a global economy globally); so the result of human action is always exactly zero, in monetary terms and overall as well.
From a physical point of view, the result of human action is always a loss, due to the laws of thermodynamics.
From a monetary point of view, zero, from a physical point of view an irretrievable loss - where, then, is the profit made?
Summing it up
Having lost their Creator and putting themselves in His place around 150 year ago, western men and women came to think of themselves not as a creatures but as creators, of themselves and their own surroundings; in a way of their own origin, even though this is mathematically impossible.
And since the past cannot be changed, the new project is now to change the future and replace the old human of yesterday and today, which came to be by random chance and adaptation to this world, with the engineered new and technically perfect Übermensch, the Super- or "Transhuman" of tomorrow, who will one day have nothing human left.
And, when perfect, go extinct when the conditions change.This does not save them from being utterly lost forever, as creatures they remain. And for those that believe in the human soul, this, too, remains to be lost.
Despite the overwhelming technical development the unleashing of the human mind and labor has produced in no more than 150 years, which is as beneficial in the short term as it is lethal in the long run for humans as humans, the laws of nature cannot be changed.All forms of life, even mechanical, or chemical, or electronic depends on metabolism and interaction with the environment, which in turn must obey the iron laws of thermodynamics:
Mass and energy are preserved. Nothing is spontaneous. A potential must be provided for from the outside, free of charge, and will be depleted until the resistance of extraction equals it. This potential must be replenished for life to resume or continue; again free of charge.
For in thermodynamics, every depletion or degradation of a potential comes with an inevitable loss, a rise in entropy, the inability too do work, which prohibits that potential to be created, augmented, or even just maintained by its own depletion.
And as it is self- diminishing, there shall be no perpetual movement, no Perpetuum Mobile.As economics rely on thermodynamic work, the same applies therein.
At the beginning of every economic chain, there must be a gift offered as a 'resource', and free of charge, and its potential must be higher than the work needed to extract and / or refine it.
This resource cannot be created by the work it feeds.Any resource will, in the end, have to be created by a self-augmenting, non-thermodynamic process called gravitation, the process by which the dead weight or mass of matter, whether it is alive or not, through gravity creates that which was not there before: higher forms and complexities of matter and energy, potentials which come with a reduction of entropy.
This is the source of life and of all in-formed being, the eternal fountain of youth and renewal. Energy is created, mass sometimes reduced. How far this is reflected in the employment of nuclear energy, and how the potential is transferred over space, remains to be discussed.This creation is an ongoing process; from the beginning to the end of time, gravity, the property of all matter, will accelerate this matter, for as long as it and the universe exist, thereby maintaining, renewing, and developing the self-created existing order, in which the movement of stellar bodies is indeed perpetual (which does not mean regular).
This process of creation is out of range for thermodynamic entities, as thermodynamic action is a result, not a prerequisite of gravitational action, and thereby a result of the process of creation.In other words, no thermodynamic being can ever be a creator, but is doomed to be a creature. The part of it that partakes in creation is its own inactive dead weight and nothing else, which was ultimately formed by - and from - the resources delivered free-of-charge by that very same creative process it took part in, as a mass.
Needless to say, this description applies to the entire universe.
Thus spawning life everywhere it can.
You do not live off a system that you have to bring forth or sustain - a thermodynamic impossibility - you live off a non-thermodynamic system that brought forth and sustains you.
This primary system, i. e. your gravitational surroundings, cannot be influenced by your thermodynamic actions - such as burning and breathing - though, arguably, lifting things into space does reduce the gravity of the planet a bit and setting off nuclear reactions does reduce its mass.
It is the resulting, secondary, thermodynamic layer that you do interact with, that is more susceptible to your actions, as you are part of that secondary system - and, being secondary, it is also smaller in volume.
Being smaller in volume makes it more reactive both to the actions of small participants, such as humans or algae; but, by the same token, also to the relentless work of the greater, primary, gravitational system, that brought it into being, maintains it and develops it, and whose only inhibitor is time.