Post by stardustpilgrim on Dec 31, 2018 14:05:07 GMT -5
Gurdjieff said that in the whole of the universe time is the unique subjective, that is, does not have an objective source, but blends with/arises out-of occurring events. But the whole of Gurdjieff's teaching can be said to be centered around entropy, and this is why Gurdjieff called time the merciless heropass. Everything erodes and decays in time, that is, moves from a more ordered state to a less ordered state, IOW, entropy, in a closed system, is always increasing. That's the second law of thermodynamics, and physicists agree it is the most incontrovertible law in physics. Entropy even in physics is what gives us the arrow of time, the flow of time past to present to future (you can't take an omelette and turn it back into eggs). Otherwise, the equations of physics are time symmetrical, they work either backwards or forwards in time.
So what can overcome entropy? Work. An example of entropy is heat always flowing from warm to cool, never from cool to warm. Say you have a heat pump and you lose electricity on a cold day and the door to your house remains open, the warm air of the house would mix with the cold air from outside until they reached equilibrium, it would get cold in the house. That's the second law of thermodynamics in operation. Work occurs when you put energy into a system. When the electricity comes back on and you close the door, your heat pump takes in exterior air, separates the faster moving molecules from the slower moving molecules, transfers the energy accumulated to Freon which transfers the heat into your house, via a copper tube. That's how a heat pump works. Work, expending energy in a certain manner, is always required to change the flow of heat from cooler to hotter.
And so what is life? Organic life is also a way of reversing entropy. Life, feeds on other living organisms to maintain itself and overcome entropy, we call this eating. Most of the energy of the earth comes from the sun. Plants transform photons from the sun into chemical energy, through photosynthesis, and become a source of energy for other organisms. This transfer of energy is the overcoming of entropy in living organisms.
In the 1800's James Clerk Maxwell stumbled upon the connection between information entropy (formulated by Claude Shannon in the late 1940's working for bell labs in relation to phone communication) and thermodynamic entropy. He came up with a thought experiment, called Maxwell's Demon, as a way to overcome entropy. This was a way to change the flow of heat from cold to hot. Maxwell pictured a room with a door which separated the room into two compartments by way of a frictionless sliding door. Maxwell proposed that a tiny being, (later called Maxwell's "Demon") watch the molecules of air moving, and when a quicker moving molecule came close to the sliding door, it world open the door quickly and let it pass into the other side, and then close the door quickly. If you did this enough times you would have one room hotter and one room colder, and you could then use the flow of energy back from hot to cold to run an engine. This would be an example of a perpetual motion machine. Even as a thought experiment Maxwell's Demon (engine) was later proven not to work, as the Demon's use of information wasn't free, and the sliding door could not be made to be frictionless, and so these canceled out the benefit of separating the molecules. (Physicist John Wheeler, teacher of both Richard Feynman and Hugh (Many-Worlds) Everett, consider information more important than matter and energy in the universe, giving us the "formula" It from bit, meaning matter derives from information).
So although as far as I know Gurdjieff never used the word entropy, everything he taught, both the cosmology (that is, the whole of the functioning of the universe) and the "psychology" (that is, the evolution of consciousness), is directly related to overcoming entropy. (Entropy {essentially} = the merciless heropass) And time is counted. So if you consider time an illusion, Gurdjieff has nothing to say to you.
So what can overcome entropy? Work. An example of entropy is heat always flowing from warm to cool, never from cool to warm. Say you have a heat pump and you lose electricity on a cold day and the door to your house remains open, the warm air of the house would mix with the cold air from outside until they reached equilibrium, it would get cold in the house. That's the second law of thermodynamics in operation. Work occurs when you put energy into a system. When the electricity comes back on and you close the door, your heat pump takes in exterior air, separates the faster moving molecules from the slower moving molecules, transfers the energy accumulated to Freon which transfers the heat into your house, via a copper tube. That's how a heat pump works. Work, expending energy in a certain manner, is always required to change the flow of heat from cooler to hotter.
And so what is life? Organic life is also a way of reversing entropy. Life, feeds on other living organisms to maintain itself and overcome entropy, we call this eating. Most of the energy of the earth comes from the sun. Plants transform photons from the sun into chemical energy, through photosynthesis, and become a source of energy for other organisms. This transfer of energy is the overcoming of entropy in living organisms.
In the 1800's James Clerk Maxwell stumbled upon the connection between information entropy (formulated by Claude Shannon in the late 1940's working for bell labs in relation to phone communication) and thermodynamic entropy. He came up with a thought experiment, called Maxwell's Demon, as a way to overcome entropy. This was a way to change the flow of heat from cold to hot. Maxwell pictured a room with a door which separated the room into two compartments by way of a frictionless sliding door. Maxwell proposed that a tiny being, (later called Maxwell's "Demon") watch the molecules of air moving, and when a quicker moving molecule came close to the sliding door, it world open the door quickly and let it pass into the other side, and then close the door quickly. If you did this enough times you would have one room hotter and one room colder, and you could then use the flow of energy back from hot to cold to run an engine. This would be an example of a perpetual motion machine. Even as a thought experiment Maxwell's Demon (engine) was later proven not to work, as the Demon's use of information wasn't free, and the sliding door could not be made to be frictionless, and so these canceled out the benefit of separating the molecules. (Physicist John Wheeler, teacher of both Richard Feynman and Hugh (Many-Worlds) Everett, consider information more important than matter and energy in the universe, giving us the "formula" It from bit, meaning matter derives from information).
So although as far as I know Gurdjieff never used the word entropy, everything he taught, both the cosmology (that is, the whole of the functioning of the universe) and the "psychology" (that is, the evolution of consciousness), is directly related to overcoming entropy. (Entropy {essentially} = the merciless heropass) And time is counted. So if you consider time an illusion, Gurdjieff has nothing to say to you.
