Really Useful Engines

Continued from Part 1:

What is Entropy? – Part 1

1. The Grammar of Entropy
2. Algorithmic Information Theories of Life
   1. Life as a Demon: The Cost of Information
   2. The Algorithm of Survival
   3. Coding for Diversity
   4. Life-Forms Must Be Efficient
3. The Mathematics of Efficiency
4. Universal Really Useful Engines
5. Compossibility: The Thermodynamic Case for Diversity
   1. The Ethics of Aliens
   2. Does Time Stop for A Sufficiently Knowing Being?
   3. The Final Cycle
6. Footnotes

The Grammar of Entropy

“**But entropy, heat, past and future are qualities that belong not to the fundamental grammar of the world but to our superficial observation of it. ‘If I observe the microscopic state of things,’ writes Rovelli, ‘then the difference between past and future vanishes … in the elementary grammar of things, there is no distinction between “cause” and “effect””**1

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I tried to sklent

to see if you

were enjoying Joep

as much as I

the Dutch poet

at the pulpit

(in his sanctuary)

striking looking

like an

Old Testament

prophet

I heard the keys

gentle Goliath

struck

to unlock

the magic wooden box

and the sounds drifted up

t’wards heaven

“Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still”

(T.S. Eliot)

I told my sad story to the wind and, brutal wind,

It would not listen to a single word.

So I sung to the cold cruel sea,

But it shrugged off my song in the toss of a wave,