Saturday, September 07, 2013

Is our solar system closed to surprise? Ask the dinosaurs!

One of the concepts Ann Voskamp writes about is how God's grace comes to us as surprises. Gagdad Bob is also writing about the element of surprise.

Classical science works at the elimination of surprise. In a closed and deterministic system -- say, the solar system -- we know in advance what it is going to do.

But even then, the solar system isn't really closed; rather, that's just an abstraction. If the solar system were literally closed, then it would be devoid of surprise -- you know, little surprises like life, mind, and spirit. Or, at the other end, just ask a dinosaur if our solar system is closed to surprise.

In fact, Marx elevated this to a doctrine, converting economic history into a closed system of class warfare, thus eliminating freedom entirely. For the Marxist, freedom is just "noise," whereas for the conservative it is everything -- both the ground and goal.

Political correctness, for example, is a typical sort of low-entropy stupid power that imposes its toxic bromides from on high in order to suppress not just spontaneity, but even the perception of reality. You might say that it is a low-entropy mechanism for maintaining a low entropy intellectual environment, e.g., university life or the media matrix.

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