I don’t know if I’ve asked this before but what (if any) is the name of the philosophy that good and evil are different states of entropy?
Biology requires order and organization in a dangerous world full of threats. The nature of existence is towards entropy, plus other life forms are attempting to cause damage to other life to acquire the resources those life forms have gathered (eating them for food, conquering their territory, forced procreation, etc).
Good is basically a state of creation/maintenance of order (of whatever we depend on for survival), evil is a state of high entropy and disorder (of whatever we depend on for survival. This could be our social systems, or bodies, our social self, etc). Is there a name for this philosophy?
I’ve personally been fond of the idea that evil is short term self interest, while good is long term self interest. An evil man kills someone for money today. A good man is generous and helpful to his community, understanding that his grateful family and friends will return the favor many times over throughout his long life.
Can’t say I agree “disorder = bad, order = good”. Sounds like something Confucius or Machiavelli would say. Or Mussolini. He made the trains run on time you know.
That ties into order though, a civilization is based on tit for tat, individuals working together on a conditional basis for the good of all. Social animals have advantages over solitary animals, but the social animals have a conditional form of acceptance (you are only valuable if your behavior makes you valuable to the group).
What happens when then evil man steps on a bug, or has a cow killed for food? that isn’t considered evil, but it is still murder of life. It is only when he murders someone valuable to the society he depends on for protection and sustenance that his acts become evil. The good man helps his community, who in turn help him. Conditional cooperation, aka tit for tat.
**Confucius Machiavelli **would be an awesome board name, I wish I’d picked that over Wesley Clark.
It’s a common misconception that life decreases entropy. Rather, living things increase entropy everywhere but their own bodies, where they keep it relatively constant, and they make that increase in entropy elsewhere quite efficiently.
It seems to me that Darwinian selection is a system that strives to defeat Entropy, and presumably, as evidenced by its factual advance, is able to stay ahead of Entropy.
Then, following that to the observation that the Human species evolved a sense of morality, via Darwinian selection, by favoring organisms which displayed a tendency to further societal development, since humans had already started down the path of social animals.
So Evil (by definition) would obstruct human social evolution, and draw the species back toward extinction, which is entropic. So the nature of successful existence ia away from entropy, not toward it.
Whether evolution “strives” for anything is not a matter for a physicist to address, but if that’s what it’s striving for, it’s failing horribly. Once again, living things do not decrease entropy. Living things increase entropy.
Biology requires order in a universe prone to disorder, where other forms of biology are actively trying to promote disorder against them. Even if biology requires more energy (from the sun) to create order than biology produces in order that still seems to be the goal of life. Create and maintain a system of order necessary for survival/procreation/thriving.
I don’t care if the term is entropy or something else (order/disorder). Suffice is to say on the largest scale is ‘good’ whatever increases the sustainability/durability of the ‘order’ we depend on for life and ‘evil’ whatever decreases it? Granted good and evil extend beyond morality. Most animals I would assume lack concepts like morality (except maybe for the social mammals), many forms of life can’t even feel physical pain but are still propelled to pursuing order that sustains their biological existence.
High social status means the social group will offer you more resources, you will have more/better mating options, you will be offered more protection from threats (we do more to protect billionaires than homeless people from crime, etc). A humiliation can decrease your value to society and decrease all these benefits. So humiliation hurts. Being physically injured (the order of your body) being damaged hurts. etc.
Order isn’t really a meaningful term, except in math or theoretical realms. So far as the universe is concerned, a perfectly spherical planet and one that’s all lumpy and weird are no better or worse than one another. The whorls of matter and energy over time as the laws of physics apply to them are no more ordered when in human shape than when dispersed as a gaseous mist over thousands of light years. That the atoms in my body ended up where they are is no less random than anything else.
Energy potential is meaningful in a universal sense as is its inverse, entropy. But one could only say that there’s order based on the fact that there are those two distinct groups. Everything within the groups is still basically chaotic (at least on the energy side of things).
