This definition of life sounds consistent with Norbert Wiener's, "The
Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society", 1950: "If we wish to
use the word life to cover all phenomena which locally swim upstream
against the current of increasing entropy, we are at liberty to do so."
I think of commercial entropy as the steady erosion of market power where
market power is the capacity to generate supranormal profits. Hence,
Commercial Life is a manifestation of those organizations which can
process market information and locally swim upstream against the steady
stream of commercial entropy.
Doug Merchant
Currently On Career Sabbatical
>As you work on it, I wonder if you have ever read a small monograph by
>Schroedinger entitled, "What is Life?" It was published by Cambridge
>Univ. Press in 1951.
>
>It's a vast oversimplification, but part of the message of one of the
>finest physicists we've yet had is that life "evades the decay to
>equilibrium" (that is, the 2nd law of thermodynamics.) While
>inanimate
>objects seem doomed to ever increasing entropy, or "entropy production"
>as
>you say, living things actually have the capability of increasing
>order.
--"Doug Merchant" <dougm@eclipse.net>
Learning-org -- Hosted by Rick Karash <rkarash@karash.com> Public Dialog on Learning Organizations -- <http://www.learning-org.com>