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by crazygringo 1031 days ago
Thanks for writing all that. The key part seems to be:

> So somehow, the ability to _accelerate_ an already inevitable process lets us reconfigure other systems _away_ from their most likely state

But this is exactly the part that doesn't make sense to me. Why would it accelerate? There's no principle I'm aware of that would prefer or cause this accelerated version. There's no such "ability".

Rather, the entropy process just happens in this "already inevitable" way you describe, without any self-organizing "resonant" structures or anything or the sort. I don't understand what would cause anything different.

It's kind of like saying boulders eventually roll downhill, so therefore hills spontaneously turn their rocky surfaces into smooth slides so the boulders can roll down faster. But that's not how it works.

1 comments

Ah I see, sorry to not address that - got carried away on entropic musings. It seems that is not an assumption he’s making, but it’s what he’s proven:

> when a group of atoms is driven by an external source of energy (…) and surrounded by a heat bath (…), it will often gradually restructure itself in order to dissipate increasingly more energy.

To be honest I cannot go any deeper without reading the paper.