Showerthoughts

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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The best ones are thoughts that many people can relate to and they find something funny or interesting in regular stuff.

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They say in an infinite multiverse versions of you exist. Yet there's an infinity of fractional numbers between 1 and 2 with no whole number 3 between, so infinity can exist without every possibility. (lemmy.world)

submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Beyond consciousness, the second law of thermodynamics also implies the presence and direction of time. In fact, it is sometimes called the Arrow of Time as it appears to direct physical processes to happen preferentially in the direction that increases entropy.

A self contained universe with fixed energy and infite time will eventually see a pile of ash turned into an apple. And it wouldn’t violate a damn thing with our system of physics.

This occuring spontaneously would indeed violate the 2nd law. This is a core disagreement between classical thermodynamics and statistical mechanics, which seems to re-derive classical thermo from probabilistic arguments over system states.

I feel it also warrants stating that Penrose's theory is not widely accepted, has yet to be tested, and is based mostly on an argument to elegance - it "seems weird" for their to be uncountably infinite parallel timelines spawning at every instant. It is far too soon for it to be taken as fact.

[+] [email protected] -1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago (1 children)

it's not spontaneous

Spontaneity in thermodynamics refers to a process which occurs without external application of energy. In your description, a pile of ash becoming an apple is spontaneous.

So in a contained universe, it doesn’t matter if it’s an apple releasing energy and becoming a pile of ash, or a pile of ash absorbing energy and becoming a perfectly normal apple.

The net energy is still conserved. Just going from energy to mass unlike mass to energy.

There is no mass-energy conversion in an apple burning to become ash, just the release of chemical energy from newly-formed bonds.

Regardless, conservation of energy is only one part of how the universe operates. The second operating principle is (or at least from hundreds of years of scientific inquiry appears to be) the maximization of entropy. That is the 'spreading out' of available energy. This is the reason iron rusts, rather than remaining oxygen and iron - conservation of energy alone cannot explain natural phenomena.

Spontaneous reconstruction of an ashed apple violates the second law of thermodynamics, and the Second law is no less valid than the First.

Lastly, I was not writing specifically about Penrose's views on consciousness. His entire theory that gravity is driving the collapse of a wave function, and that said collapse occurs retroactively, is untested and based on an appeal to elegance. This does not make it wrong, but it most certainly should not be taken as true.