Penrose has put forward cosmic cyclical cosmology. The Universe continues to expand and after an unthinkably large number (10 100 years) all is returned to a primordial formless state which in turn gives rise to the next cosmos. Many have noticed that this bears resemblance to the cyclic cosmologies of Eastern religions, however the time-scale that Penrose envisages is far, far greater than even they do (and they certainly envisage billions of years). I tried to read his book on it, Cycles of Time, but you need a lot of maths knowledge to read Penrose, something I donât have.
I think Iâm not following you when you state that we are not a closed system. What do you mean by âclosedâ?
My perspective on entropy was more related to organised or disorganised systems. Disorganised systems tend to be isolated. For example, a thermo. This rudimentary object keeps the heat and coffee from escaping. When I open the thermos to drink or when I accidentally pour it down on the floor, the heat and liquid turn disorganised. Therefore, chaotic.
It is intriguing to debate if entropy leads to this inevitably from a phenomenal point of view. I mean, whether the systems tend to go from organised to disorganised.
Iâm more inclined to see phenomena as fundamental laws which lead us to a more profound understanding of natural occurrences. For example, thunderstorms and gravity are phenomena, not ideas.
Perhaps entropy might be considered an idea. However, according to some scientists, entropy is a fundamental law of thermodynamics. Therefore, it is a phenomenon, not an idea.
@Meta_U read what I wrote above, please. I think I answer your point.
The Ilyenkov-Berdyaev parallel is real and you are right to see it. Both assign a cosmically significant role to consciousness. The difference is not just vocabulary â it is about where the necessity comes from. For Berdyaev, consciousness has cosmic significance because spirit is primary. For Ilyenkov, consciousness has cosmic significance because matter requires it â anti-entropy at the highest level is what prevents the universe from dying. The direction is opposite: Berdyaev starts from spirit and arrives at matter. Ilyenkov starts from matter and arrives at something that looks like spirit but is not.
And yes â he was censured for being too Hegelian. The irony is that his cosmology is more Spinozist than Hegelian: substance does not develop toward spirit, substance already contains thought as an attribute. But in the Soviet context, sounding too much like Hegel meant sounding too much like an idealist, which was a professional death sentence.
Penroseâs Conformal Cyclic Cosmology is a remarkable convergence. Ilyenkov proposed a cyclic cosmology in 1956 from dialectical philosophy. Penrose proposed one in 2010 from mathematical physics. There is no evidence they knew of each otherâs work â Ilyenkovâs treatise remained unpublished during his lifetime and circulated only in Soviet philosophical circles. The mechanism differs â Ilyenkov imagines thinking matter deliberately triggering a new cycle, Penrose imagines conformal geometry doing it automatically â but the structure is the same: the universe does not end in heat death, it resets.
You ask: why are the conditions for consciousness so difficult to achieve? I think this is the right question and I do not have a complete answer. But consider: the conditions for nuclear fusion are also difficult to achieve. You need enormous mass and pressure. The universe is mostly cold, empty space. Stars are rare compared o the volume they occupy. Yet nobody calls fusion accidental â it is structurally guaranteed given ufficient mass. The difficulty of the conditions does not undermine the necessity of the outcome.
You worry that ultimate entropy cannot be avoided. Kuznetsov â the physicist I mentioned â calculated that by the 22nd century, the energy of the biosphere-society system could approach the energy output of the Sun. At that point, the Earth becomes too small. But the Earth is not a closed system â it exchanges energy with the cosmos. The path forward is outward. Whether this can scale to cosmological dimensions is the open question. But the trajectory is clear: anti-entropy grows, not shrinks.
The Ilyenkov-Berdyaev convergence is worth pressing on, because the resemblance conceals an opposition.
Both assign cosmic significance to consciousness. But the direction of necessity is reversed.
Berdyaev starts from spirit. Spirit is primary, free, unconditioned. Matter is its limitation â the prison from which consciousness must liberate itself. A universe without consciousness is metaphysically impossible because consciousness is the ground. You cannot have a world without the thing that makes worlds.
Ilyenkov starts from matter. Consciousness is not primary â it arises from material organization at a specific level of complexity. But once it arises, it turns out to be structurally necessary: without anti-entropy at the scale that only thinking can produce, the universe dies. A universe without consciousness is physically impossible â not because consciousness is the ground, but because the universe cannot sustain itself without it.
Berdyaev gives you metaphysical impossibility: no spirit, no world.
Ilyenkov gives you physical impossibility: no thinking, no survival.
These are not the same claim in different vocabularies. They have different consequences. For Berdyaev, freedom is primary and necessity is a fallen condition â spirit is free precisely because it is not bound by natural law. For Ilyenkov, freedom is the understanding of necessity (Spinoza) â thinking is free not because it escapes natural law, but because it grasps it deeply enough to act within it effectively.
So when you say Ilyenkov looks like âa philosophy of spirit in Marxist guiseâ â the guise is doing more work than it appears. Strip away the Marxism and you do not find Berdyaev underneath. You find Spinoza: substance that thinks not because spirit descends into it, but because thinking is what substance does when it reaches the level of organization at which it can counteract its own dissolution.
Fire and electricity both produce light. They are not the same phenomenon.
I see. But it is still remarkable to me that life is even a possibility under the second principle of thermodynamics. If that is the âlast wordâ, the deepest truth, life (and consciousness) become to me a cruel absurd accident.
IIRC, some physicists argue that the expansion of the universe isnât compatible with the time translation symmetry which via Noether theorem is related to the conservation of energy. If the latter is not satisfied, the universe isnât an isolated system.
Yes, I agree with that. This is rather good point. Life and consciousness must be a necessary feature of this universe, at least in the form of âpotentialsâ. Iâm rather Aristotelian on these matters and I believe that the potency of life and consciousness is indeed an intrinsic feature of this world that isnât currently explainable with the known physical laws.
@Wayfarer
Yes, thereâs that idea. The narrator says, âPenrose, himself, has admitted that his model is extremely speculative.â But I think any model on this topic is extremely speculative.
Not sure I follow. 2nd law is energy conservation in a closed system, and life forms are hardly closed systems. See just below.
A system (like a life form say) takes in low entropy energy (food?) and discards high entropy waste, this maintaining somewhat stable state. Earth (as a system) is similar: Sunlight in, high entropy head radiation out, almost in perfect balance, thus maintaining the entropic state over time.
Disorganised systems tend to be isolated. For example, a thermo. This rudimentary object keeps the heat and coffee from escaping.
Nothing does that, but a thermos slows down the escape. It make the coffee system more isolated, but it doesnât make it isolated.
It also keeps the coffee in one place, so organized as you say. Once disorganized (onto the floor), it requires new energy to put it back into the organized state.
How is it possible that something closed by definition is also âinfiniteâ which means boundless? Isnât that blatant contradiction?
I think youâre a little confused here Javi. Fundamental laws are inductive conclusions, they are generalizations. Therefore they are concepts, ideas.
The problem I see is that if there is no really isolated system, the second law of thermodynamics should be taken to be an approximation. A very good one, but still an approximation and arguably not the âend of the storyâ.
Irrespective of the second law of thermodynamics, I just canât see how the known laws of physics can explain how life arose. To me the very fact that life began is evidence that reductionism is wrong.
I now understand why you state that entropy is an idea. Good point, and thanks for the clarification, MU.
However, I still believe that entropy is a phenomenon because it is measurable and it is a natural process. I mean, it is not a theoretical concept, not an idea.
Another perspective is that we can make ideas and questions based on that phenomenon, for instance.
A closed system is one where nothing (matter, radiation, forces, any causal influence) enters or leaves the system. A universe with a miracle-performing god is closed only if the god is part of the universe (like say Zeus).
I would say that entropy is a measurable physical quantity, kind of like length. It is therefore more than just a concept.
Boundless: I attempted to highlight a comment near the bottom of your post and intercepted the emoji instead. Hence my âthinkingâ reaction, which I cannot change. Just in case youâre wondering what thatâs all about.
2nd law is not an approximation any more than Newtonâs laws of motion are mere approximations because thereâs technically no object lacking external forces acting upon it.
It just means that declaring real objects to be closed system is most often just an approximation. Look to putting macroscopic objects into superposition for examples of thermodynamic isolated systems. It just doesnât work if the system is only approximately isolated.
They donât. They also donât forbid it. Itâs like looking in a flower arranging book to figure out how light bulbs work. Wrong book. At this time there is no right book since we donât know the exact origins of life. My personal opinion is that it formed elsewhere and fell from our sky, but that doesnât answer the question, only moves it somewhere else. On the other hand, the mathemtics of life make it a certainty. No matter how low the odds, if itâs possible at all, it has to happen somewhere in an infinite universe.
Ok, but generally in these kinds of discussions the second principle of thermodynamics is taken as true precisely because it is seen to apply to the âwhole universeâ. Weâre told that the universe will reach a state of higher entropy that it is now precisely because we think that the principle applies to it.
They donât. They also donât forbid it. Itâs like looking in a flower arranging book to figure out how light bulbs work. Wrong book. At this time there is no right book since we donât know the exact origins of life. My personal opinion is that it formed elsewhere and fell from our sky, but that doesnât answer the question, only moves it somewhere else. On the other hand, the mathemtics of life make it a certainty. No matter how low the odds, if itâs possible at all, it has to happen somewhere in an infinite universe.
Yes, merely allowing life is not like explaining it. I mean, gravity of course allows life and in parts favours it but isnât enough to explain life. All Iâm saying is that the understanding of the âlaw of naturesâ that we now have in physics isnât enough to explain the arising of life.
However, life is there, so if we believe that it can be explained, we should have a theory that explains it. And IMO all the characteristics of life canât be reduced to what we know when we study physics.
One of the best known philosophical concepts related to Entropy is Platoâs story of the origin of orderly Cosmos (system) from disorderly Chaos (potential). So, from a modern perspective, that could explain the origin of a dimensionless mathematical âsingularityâ â long ago, and far away â that, for reasons unknown, went Bang! But, after that low Entropy (high Energy) beginning, itâs been all downhill : the second law of thermodynamics ruled . . . . except for a small blue planet on the outskirts of a minor galaxy, where Negentropy has produced a minicosm, where the second law takes second place.
In that little corner of the world, Matter & Negentropy1 (energy + law) have somehow organized into Life & Mind. And those living & thinking creatures, until recently, believed that their warm & wet habitat was the center of the Cosmos. Until, that is, they started poking their noses into telescopes, and peering back in time to discover that Entropy is also a physical phenomenon.
1 Negentropy (or negative entropy) is the process of creating order from chaos, requiring energy input to temporarily decrease entropy within a specific system. While the second law of thermodynamics states total entropy always increases, negentropy enables organized structures (like life) by transferring energy to create localized order, essentially acting as âordered energyâ. https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=negentropy+energy+plus+law
Entropy is not measured, it is inferred. Nor is energy itself measured, but inferred. Other features are measured, then through the application of transformation principles, the amount of energy, or entropy, is calculated. Energy cannot be directly measured itself, because it is calculated from more than one measured property, mass and velocity for example, in the case of kinetic energy.
The question was, how could an infinite universe be a closed system.
The singularity was never a point at a location. The bang happened literally everywhere, including exactly here. It is a bound to spacetime. Itâs not contradictory for infinite things to be bounded. The set of whole numbers is bounded at 0, but infinite nonetheless.
Weâre no exception. Almost all planets around active stars are in reasonable thermodynamic equilibrium, exactly like Earth. Life appearing didnât much change that. A little. Life made it a bit cooler, and then hotter again.
By nothing leaving it, and nothing affecting it from outside. Per definition.
