Subject: A must read essay

Posted by John Gunkler on 6/4/2004
In Reply To:A must read essay Posted by Louis Macovsky on 6/4/2004

Message:

Both the first words of this essay and the text refer to a small monograph, "What is life?", written by Erwin Schrödinger. Here's an Amazon.com link to it:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0521427088/103-6366982-5216631?v=glance

Schrödinger's ideas seem to have been pretty much ignored in his lifetime. I first encountered a reference to this work in some "general systems theory" stuff some 30 years ago -- where the discussion was about entropy and whether ever-increasing entropy was the unavoidable fate of the universe. Schrödinger thought that self-organizing systems decreased entropy and were how we would possibly avoid the inevitability of entropy death.

He also was convinced, before most of his peers in the physical sciences, that emergent phenomena characterized increasing levels of complexity. I can remember, in college, reading philosophy of science texts that concluded that "emergence" was a nonsense concept -- that everything that occurred at a macro level could be explained by understanding what went on at the micro level ("reductionism.") That, ultimately, everything boils down to physics. I wonder, now, at how anyone could be so naive (as I was) to believe this!

Follow Ups:

A must read essay - Bill Ellis 6/9/2004