Worldview: building blocks
Chapter 1 - Worldview
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Welcome to the 'building blocks of the worldview' page
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Four core concepts
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We start our journey with four concepts without which you cannot share your experiences and hence work together:
- reality,
- entropy,
- free energy,
- and life.
Together they results in:“living entities that are chemical, physical and informational machines". They construct their own metabolism and use it to maintain themselves, grow and reproduce. These living machines are co-ordinated and regulated by managing information, with the effect that living entities operate as purposeful wholes.
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Key take-aways from the deep dive
- To understand the world, you must try to understand the relationships between its components and yourselve
- Entropy governs the physical world, and causes the world to fall apart. "“For dust you are, and to dust you shall return", the patriarchs already said
- In contrast, life is a connecting force that brings elements together
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Deep dive
Reality
Have you ever wondered what reality is made of? The "Stuff" that makes up reality, like matter, space, and time, are seemingly stable, unchangeable aspects of nature. In truth, matter, space, and time are mutable manifestations of more profound, unshakable foundations. It's the relationship between space and time that always stays the same, even as space contracts and time dilates.
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Relational reality
The relationship between space and time leads us towards a relational reality. The properties of people, teams or organisations are less a property of these people, groups, or organisations than how we experience them in their relationships with each other and with us.
Relational quantum mechanics postulates that reality exists in the relationship between particles, not within the particles themselves. On the most fundamental level, the direct connection between elements in the universe provides us with our reality.
A similar principle provides us with surprising results in our daily lives. How we experience the world is not a characteristic of an entity we see, hear, feel or taste. Instead, it results from our relationship with entities in the world. The colour red, for example, is not the quality of the apple we see but the result of our ability to experience a particular light wavelength like red. Many mammals are colourblind and live in a different type of world. At the same time, they are as adapted to their world as we are adapted to ours.
Humans live in the niche (part) of reality we can relate to. At the same time, our world and the world of colourblind mammals intertwine at a deeper relational level.
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Entropy, not energy
There is a common misunderstanding that energy makes the world go round. This ensures that energy gets a mystical status in our daily lives.
If we were to live on energy, we would all live in the Sahara and only sunbathe. Instead, we live on the rhythm of entropy. We search for sources of low entropy, e.g. food. Our activity - and the time it takes - shifts the low entropy towards higher entropy.
This process frees up resources we can use but also resources we can't use: waste. The entropy at the end of a process will always be higher than at the beginning.
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Examples of types of entropy
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Climate change
Climate change is a clear example of what we postulate above. We can't do anything with the low-entropy petroleum we use. So, instead, we use the heat from the combustion process of oil. In this process, we create two sources of high entropy: heat and free co². The latter establishes a blanket of complexity in our atmosphere. Being a blanket, it radiates heat back to the earth's surface. Being a complex of high entropy, we can't use it anymore.
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Software entropy
Ivar Jacobson et al., in 1992, describe software entropy as follows: The second law of thermodynamics, in principle, states that a closed system's disorder cannot be reduced; it can only remain unchanged or increase. A measure of this disorder is entropy. This law also seems plausible for software systems; its disorder tends to increase as a system is modified, known as software entropy.
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Knowledge diversity
Entropy is one of several ways to measure bio- or knowledge diversity. A diversity index is a quantitative statistical measure of how many different types exist in a dataset, such as species in a community, accounting for ecological richness, evenness, and dominance. As a result, knowledge becomes increasingly complex. This complexity can become problematic —like climate change. (See: We, the people with peculiar brains.)
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Business entropy
Think of the administrative burden. The administration aims to reduce variation (from an Excel list to an ERP package). Yet, time and again, people complain that the workload is increasing. This increase is business entropy. You can think of examples from the operational side of the business.
Businesses that grow and sustain themselves typically invest in interventions that stimulate creativity, alignment, brand awareness, training, and/or innovation and receive focus from these activities. They try to create stability by recreating business culture, systems, and processes, which is critical for growth and sustainability. But, simultaneously, they encounter entropy in an ongoing fashion as collateral damage to their efforts.
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Free energy principle
Have you ever wondered why, while the universe tends towards entropy or dissolution, all biological systems resist the Second Law of thermodynamics, from the cell to the human brain?
Karl Friston's 'Free Energy Principle' offers a plausible explanation of how living things go about doing so:
- To be alive is to act in ways that reduce the difference between your expectations and sensory inputs.
This idea is called the 'Free Energy Principle'. Free energy is the difference between the states you expect to be in and the states your senses tell you that you are in. Or otherwise stated, the difference between our position now and our initial belief. We will always try to minimise this gap, this 'Free Energy'. So, your brain will tell your body to act the 'next moment' in the expectation of minimising the gap. The free energy principle is the opposite of entropy. Where entropy is about opening up, minimising free energy is about creating relationships and coherence between your bodily position, sensing the reaction of the world and your pre-existing model of the world. We will go into this in more detail later.
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| Content source |
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| Work and concepts of Anil Seth and Karl Friston |
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Life
Paul Nurse was awarded the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, along with Leland Hartwell and Tim Hunt, for their discoveries of protein molecules that control the division of cells in the cell cycle. He describes five core elements that constitute life:
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Chemistry
We need to consider life as chemistry. One of the simplest chemical reactions carried out by living things, and one of the longest exploited by humanity, is fermentation, the conversion of sugars to other substances, including alcohol, with carbon dioxide as a by-product. In a cell, the same string of amino acids will always try to form the same specific shape. This leap from one to 3-dimensional is crucial since each protein has a distinctive physical shape and a unique set of chemical properties. As a result, cells can build enzymes to fit together very precisely with the chemical substances they work on.
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The cell
Cells have an outer wall, which separates them from their environment, but they are highly complex and compartmentalised structures so that each cell is a living entity. Cell division (forming two cells from a single parent cell) is fundamental to all life.
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The gene
Genes are the basic units of inheritance. Their existence was demonstrated in the mid-19th century by Gregor Mendel's work when he was abbot of the Augustinian monastery in Bruenn (now Brno), where he studied the inherited attributes of peas. In this work, he discovered simple mathematical relationships that only made sense in terms of discrete units, which he called "elements", which we call genes, and which occur in pairs in all cells that have a nucleus. By the 1940s, it was clear that these genes were carried within the nucleus by its chromosomes (the word means "coloured bodies") and specifically by one particular kind of molecule (deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA) within those chromosomes. Ordinary cell division starts with doubling the number of chromosomes in the parent cell, followed by sharing between its two daughters. As for DNA itself, its specific double-stranded structure explains its ability to store information, as well as the ability of each strand to act as a template for the other. The DNA molecule is a sequence of four distinct kinds of units, which provide a four-letter alphabet that encodes the genetic information. The DNA copying process is highly accurate but imperfect, and the changes that occur during copying are called mutations.
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Information
Information is essential to biological functioning. Living things and their components are the only natural systems we can see in terms of function, and functioning means responding to information about the local environment from the molecular scale upwards. The construction of living things requires information. DNA stores that information in the form of its four-letter alphabet. Information management is also involved in gene regulation, which, in complex organisms, decides how a cell will develop. We understand living things as collections of modules, each of which performs a particular task, connected by feedback loops, and the information flow in these loops determines which modules function at any specific time. However, living organisms are very different in one crucial sense from our own information-handling devices. These are hardwired, but in living things, the connections themselves are responsive to circumstances.
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Natural selection
Mutation continually generates new variants, and sexual production enables such variants to spread through species. The endless shuffling of genes generates novel combinations. Novelty is further enhanced by the transfer of genes between different species, for which viruses can act as vectors.
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Relational beings
We humans cannot live without others. They are vital to us. But in addition, we are aware of the context in which we find ourselves and our position among those others. The unique trick of consciousness is being able to project action and time into a range of possible futures.
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