and thereby expend themselves,
physicists call the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics:
The Law of Entropy.
"latent potentials" means "what's possible"
"activate" means "becomes actual"
"expend" means "give ones gifts"
"Entropy" is the relative amount of order or disorder
characterizing a living (or active) system.
The movement from disorder to disorder
characterizes the down-hill slope
that makes things run.
Things run down.
Meaning.
They move from no-function
to function
to non-function.
UNLESS.
A peculiar phenomenon known as neg-entropy
comes into play.
Neg-entropy is emergent
like the light of the Sun is emergent from the Sun.
It is the formation of living (active) functions
in existence
by means of the gathering and organizing
of the forces of existence
into behaviors of some duration (durability).
It exists in both living and non-living realms.
It's just that the non-living realms
are running a downhill slope,
while the living realms
are bringing to life
newly emergent functions.
One of those newly emergent functions
is to make non-living realms
run uphill,
going from less active (less functional)
to more active (more functional).
In the non-living or inanimate realms
we call that
Technology.
Another of those newly emergent functions
is to make the living realms
run uphill longer and further
going from active (functional) in some ways
into active in more ways.
Neg-entropy
is that function.
In the living or animate realms,
we call the first stage of increasing entropy
Maturation
and we call the second stage of increasing entropy
Evolution.
In both cases, personal abilities emerge
we put energy into them
and we expend ourselves in our developing potentials.
Immaturity is a lower-entropy level.
As immaturity matures,
latent personal abilities emerge
dispensing the energies of the being
among those abilities.
Maturity is a higher-entropy level.
There are more ways to function
and more functions active
more ways to dispense our energies
and more dispersion of them.
Here's where the trick of the Neg-entropists comes in:
how to recover what we have lost to entropy,
how to recover from the scattering of our energies.
THE QUANDARY:
As functions awaken, energies or potentials disperse.
There's a limit to how much attention a person can give
to conditions at any moment.
Our functional capacity is limited.
"Ya can only get so much done in a day."
THE UPGRADE
Reversing the increase of entropy.
Clean-up.
First step:
Identify points of friction in life,
grounded in memories.
Abilities that worked for us in the past
may not apply or fit well to present conditions.
That poor fit creates friction.
That poor fit is based in our memory of how things
used to work, but no longer do, exactly.
Friction.
Dissolve the grip of those memories,
make room for something new and better-fitting:
dissolve the friction.
Less friction, less wasted effort.
That applies to "internal contractions" (broken integrity).
Reclaim and recycle our capacity for
attending, intending, remembering and imagining
taken up by old, not such good ways of doing and being,
anymore.
Second step:
Apply that reclaimed and recycled capacity
to current projects.
"Current projects" means "creative activities".
Attention has the peculiar property that
the more you look,
the more you see
(or hear, or feel).
That's emergence.
And the more coherent the looking
("coherent" means "having it together",
more signal, less noise)
the more likely it is that something coherent will emerge
from the inchoate mass of latent potentials.
Something new emerges.
That's neg-entropy in action, recovering energy and attention,
then inducing new things emerging in the new-again movement toward higher entropy -- life occurring.
Another word for coherence is, integrity.
Another name for neg-entropy is, newness.
Entropy is the activating of potentials and expending of resources;
neg-entropy is the integration of potentials,
into simplified, larger wholes in patterns of organization
and the reclaiming and conserving of resources.
Living and evolving species need and embody
both entropy and neg-entropy.
Too much entropy puts a drag on everything.
Too much neg-entropy may create a sonic boom
of emergence. Might be a bit much.
It's a question of balance.
© 2014 Lawrence Gold
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