Organization Maintained by Extracting 'Order' from the Environment

[Robert]

This profound thought was originally suggested 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...

[mkirkpatrick]

What really is life,does anybody really understand it in its entirety,where do we come from,and where are we going,and what means will we use to get there.
There is an ancient saying that life is like a dark flame,and that the essence of real life is unknowable,what is it that lives,and is there really anything that is Dead.some say that even a stone is conscious,albeit less expansive than our own,but still alive,I would suggest that all is alive,and that so called death is just another word for changing vehicles.mind and consciousness are eternal
by nature and so of course are we?

so what is the purpose of life then?maybe to keep changing vehicles until we
get the perfect one!

kind regards.michael.

[Guille]

I don't know who, but I know someone once said:

"Life is there to be lived, not to be understood [thought about]"

Well, this depends of course in what is your opinion about the relationship between live and thought.

Should we think thought, and live life? Which of course, would impply that they are two "independent from each other" entities.

Or should we think life, and live thought? Which of course, would impply that they are two "dependent from each other" entities.

Out of my expirience of life, I must say that I believe they are dependent, because as dependency cannot live with indepency, and vive versa, then there must only be one, and the other one is an illusion, and, by pure logic, we must conclude that the one there is is the one that is mor eabundant, and I can say that I have experienced much more things which depend on and are dependent on than independent things.

Anyway, the aim of human life and existence is to achieve perfection.

[michellemfry]

So evolution can be viewed as negative entropy driven from disorder to order. That would make us occupiers of the anti-universe or parallel universe to the physical world, wouldn't it? Or perhaps we have a foot in each universe, so to speak.

[HappytheStripper]

What really is life,does anybody really understand it in its entirety,where do we come from,and where are we going,and what means will we use to get there.
There is an ancient saying that life is like a dark flame,and that the essence of real life is unknowable,what is it that lives,and is there really anything that is Dead.some say that even a stone is conscious,albeit less expansive than our own,but still alive,I would suggest that all is alive,and that so called death is just another word for changing vehicles.mind and consciousness are eternal
by nature and so of course are we?

so what is the purpose of life then?maybe to keep changing vehicles until we
get the perfect one!

kind regards.michael.

Life is death and life and death again over and over and over ... watch this space for more..... information and knowledge..... im just changing vehicles of thought... which.... before TOEQUEST.... was rather complex.... and is now at this moment so simple.....

[HappytheStripper]

Which is singular.... and born of extraction.... I think Ive discussed this as a GOD the Generic Or Genetic or General order od progression towards development.... maybe I will discuss this again in another thread.