Entropy & Complexity – Similarities between the Universe and Humanity and Thoughts on Free Will

I am writing a multi part blog on Free Will & Determinism. Here is the link to part 1: Free Will & Determinism: Trajectory or Inevitability

https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/free-determinism-trajectories-inevitable-part-1-doug-hohulin

Future blogs:

• Predictive Analytics & Automation: are we giving out free will over to machines: Accessing, Sharing, Filtering, Searching – Part 3
• Quantum Computers & the Multiverse and Optimizing the future – Part 4
• What World Do You Want to Live In: Terminator World, Wall-E World or Baymax World – Part 5

Prologue

"The great Samuel Johnson captured the conflict quite well centuries ago. When asked if he believed we have free will, he replied that all theory holds that we do not and all experience holds that we do. It is certainly true that when we look inward, we don’t feel ourselves operating with the same mechanical precision of a clock or the orbit of a planet. What it feels like is that we have vibrancy, will, intention, drive, and ambition. These could all be illusions, but virtually everyone on both sides of the issue acknowledges it feels like we have free will." - Byron Reese in his new book "The Fourth Age"

"Man can do what he wants, but he cannot will what he wills" Arthur Schopenhauer

Introduction

In the YouTube video: The Big Picture: Entropy & Time (feat. Sean Carroll) S1 ? E3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTFY0H4EZx4

Where Does Complexity Come From? (Big Picture Ep. 3/5), it states

 “The early universe was very smooth and very dense: that’s low-entropy, and also extremely simple. The far future will be smooth again, but very dilute: that’s high-entropy, and again extremely simple. It’s now, in the medium-entropy middle, that things look complex. Stars and galaxies and veins of minerals in rock and swirling clouds and amino acids and proteins and human beings and cats – we’re at the exciting, beautiful stage of the coffee mixing!”

I started thinking about the similarities of a baby and the very old. Complexity and Entropy at the beginning and ending of the Universe is a little like free will and determinism of a person when they are either a baby or the very old. The baby at the beginning of life and a person on their death bed are very similar in one way. They can try to connect with those around them, sleep, poop, and call for help to be fed and get their other basic needs met. Both have very little control over their current situation but their futures will be very different. A baby has a future of so many possibilities before him, and person on their death bed has only one destiny left.

Brian Christian in the book, The Most Human Human: What Talking with Computers Teaches Us About What It Means to Be Alive (pp. 223-224) wrote: "Grandmaster chess games are said to begin with a novelty, which is the first move of the game that exits the book [that part of chess that is memorized]. It could be the fifth, it could be the thirty-fifth. We think about a chess game as beginning with move one and ending with checkmate. But this is not the case . The game begins when it gets out of book, and it ends when it goes into book. Like electricity, it only sparks in the gaps. The opening book, in particular, is massive. The game may end before you get out, but it doesn’t begin until you do. Said differently, you may not get out alive; on the other hand, you’re not alive until you get out."

"Like most conversations and most chess games [and life itself], we all start off the same and we all end up the same, with a brief moment of difference in between.  Fertilization to fertilizer. Ashes to ashes . And we spark across the gap." 

Brian Christian then went on to write:

“One of the startling results that Shannon found in “A Mathematical Theory of Communication” is that text prediction and text generation turn out to be mathematically equivalent. A phone that could consistently anticipate what you were intending to write, or at least that could do as well as a human, would be just as intelligent as the program that could write you back like a human. Meaning that the average American teenager, going by the New York Times’s 2009 statistics on cell phone texting, participates in roughly eighty Turing tests a day. This turns out to be incredibly useful and also incredibly dangerous. In charting the links between data compression and the Turing test’s hunt for the human spark, I’ll explore why.

I want to begin with a little experiment I did recently, to see if it was possible to use a computer to quantify the literary value of James Joyce. I took a passage from Ulysses at random and saved it on my computer as raw text: 1,717 bytes. Then I wrote the words “blah blah blah” over and over until it matched the length of the Joyce excerpt, and saved that: 1,717 bytes. Then I had my computer’s operating system, which happens to be Mac OS X, try to compress them. The “blah” file compressed all the way down to 478 bytes, just 28 percent of its previous size, but Ulysses only came down to 79 percent of its prior size, or 1,352 bytes— leaving it nearly three times as large as the “blah” file. When the compressor pushed down, something in the Joyce pushed back.”

If a person could have an analysis of everything he said or wrote, I wonder what this would say about the level of Shannon entropy in his or her communications. Small talk has very little information. (Wikipedia, “Entropy in thermodynamic can be used to determine the energy not available for useful work in a thermodynamic process.”) Maybe the lack of information in a conversation has something to say about how hard we are working on the conversation. A boring conversation is deterministic and an interesting one is full of free will.

Michio Kaku, The Future of the Mind: The Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance, and Empower the Mind wrote:

 “What lurks behind our eyes? This raises haunting questions like: Do we have a soul? What happens to us after we die? Who am "I" anyway? And most important, this brings us to the ultimate question: Where do we fit into this great cosmic scheme?”

It is interesting to read a book when considering a topic. I did so with these 5 books on the idea of free will. I counted how many times “free will” is referenced in the book.   

• Most Human Human – Brian Christian – free will – 1; poem – 12; poet -45
• Creating a mind – Ray Kurzweil - 55
• Future of the mind – Michio Kaku - 1
• Why the West Rules--for Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future – Ian Morris – 12
• THE MOON IS A HARSH MISTRESS - by Robert A. Heinlein - 1

Author’s Note: I also counted on how many times poet or poem comes up in a search in the book the Most Human Human. Poetry is the height of “free will” in writing. As they say: Poetic License.

I especially liked Ian Morris’ quotes on Tolstoy - War and Peace on the topic of free will, “If there is even a single body moving freely, then the laws of Kepler and Newton are negated and no conception of the movement of the heavenly bodies any longer exists. If any single action is due to free will, then not a single historical law can exist, nor any conception of historical events.”

to which Dr. Morris replies

“This is nonsense. High-level nonsense, to be sure, but nonsense all the same. On any given day any prehistoric forager could have decided not to intensify, and any farmer could have walked away from his fields or her grindstone to gather nuts or hunt deer.”

I believe that determinism is like entropy, in the end our fate is sealed but just like we can fight entropy with energy available to do work, we can fight determinism by our will (free or not). I am at my best when I fight my routine, my appetites, and do creative things or show self-discipline and exercise my "free" will. Most of us do not achieve our full potential and that may be because we do not fight what we think is our destiny; be it our genes, environment, obesity, addition or laziness.

Even at the end of life, with our choices are so limited, our destiny so certain, even then, we can choose our attitude and how we want to interact with family, friends and those around us. Because, 'When the fall's all that's left, it matters a great deal.'

“The two hardest things to say in life are hello for the first time and goodbye for the last.“ Brian Christian