Episode 82

The eighth in a series of episodes wherein Juliet and I begin by jointly consulting the I Ching (ancient Chinese oracle), getting hexagram 4, "Youthful Folly", and then see where that goes. We continue to consider the question of how the phenomenon of biological life can be squared with the laws of thermodynamics (in particular the tendency of entropy to increase). I bring up Luigi Fantappiè's ideas of "syntropy" and life being "caused from the future". Juliet muses further on "entropic heat death" as the fate of the Universe, leading to a consideration of Buddhist doctrine which seems to aim for the elimination of consciousness, and the opposing tendency for certain ultra-rationalists to push for the spreading of synthetic life across the entirety of the "dead" Universe. After a detour into liminography (automatic or "threshold" writing), we return to how "Youthful Folly" could possibly be applied to our cosmological conversation of the previous few episodes.

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Some relevant links:

• my talk on "Retrocausality and other reverse-time phenomena"
• entropy
• entropy and life
• thermodynamics
• the ultimate fate of the universe
• entropic heat death
• Luigi Fantappiè
• syntropy/negentropy/extropy
• Vipassana
• bodhisattva
• Nick Bostrom (AI safety expert) on spreading life across the Universe (not quite the same as Eric's argument in Episode 19, but related)
• William James
• etymology of "ineffable"
• Rob Dickins
• Psychedelic Press
• Rob Higgs (mechanical sculptor)
• liminograpy (automatic/threshold writing)
• I Ching
• hexagram 4: "youthful folly"
• self-organisation
• emergence
• James N. Gardner's "Biocosm Hypothesis"
• Christmas tree worms (Spriobranchus giganteus)