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Organization Maintained by Extracting 'Order' from the Environment
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Robert
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Organization Maintained by Extracting 'Order' from the Environment - 08-17-2005, 02:13 PM

This profound thought was originally suggested by JAK.

Quote:
Originally Posted by JAK
"How would we express in terms of the statistical theory the marvellous faculty of a living organism, by which it delays the decay into thermodynamical equilibrium (death)? We said before: 'It feeds upon negative entropy' ... entropy, taken with the negative sign, is itself a measure of order. Thus the device by which an organism maintains itself stationary at a fairly high level of orderliness (= fairly low level of entropy) really consists in continually sucking orderliness from its environment." - Schrödinger, Erwin. What is Life? NEW YORK: Cambridge University Press, 1944
References
  1. This is an excerpt from "What is Life?" and provides more context to the quote above. I recommend that you read this before responding to this thread.
  2. This article is part of JAK's Theory of Mind website where he supplies context to this quote from his viewpoint of a theory unifying the mind and emotion.
  3. Another interesting document that contains this quote. It is titled "Meaning-Based Natural Intelligence vs Information-Based Artificial Intelligence". This is a 67 page pdf document.
Let the discussion begin...


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Last edited by Robert : 01-15-2006 at 09:40 PM.
  
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