About me:
We are never victims of circumstance. There is only our thoughts and how we choose to respond to them.


All machines, in fact, must eventually break down, and scientists have

confirmed that the law describing this energy exchange in a machine applies

to all energy systems in the universe. This fact of nature is often spoken

of as the law of increasing entropy. Entropy, simply put, is a measure of

the amount of randomness or chaos in a system, and the law of increasing

entropy is an expression of the fact the the universe is irreversibly

moving toward a state of increased disorder and randomness. Left to itself,

with no energy input from the outside, any system will tend to break down

and become increasingly disordered. A car will turn to rust and fall apart,

a mountain will eventually be worn down, and so on. Even the expansion of

the universe itself is a movement in the direction of increasing disorder,

increasing entropy.



Yet we can plainly see that many things in the universe tend toward

increased order -- the opposite of what is predicted by the second law of

thermodynamics. Life itself has evolved as atoms became molecules, then

amino acids, proteins, cells, multi-cellular life, social systems, and so

on -- definitely a process of increasing order, and obviously against the

flow of increasing entropy. How can this be? This seeming paradox puzzled

scientists for over a hundred years until Prigogine discovered the key:

that order arises not in spite of entropy, but because of it!

Progigine called these open systems that evolve and grow by taking in

energy and matter from their environment and then

dissipating the resulting

entropy into their environment "dissipative structures."

Such structures, in order to maintain their existence, must

interact with their environment, continually maintaining

the flow of energy into and out of the system.

Dissipative structures flourish in unstable, fluctuating
environments by being plastic enough to handle the

variations and changes in such

environments. The more ordered and complex a system

becomes, the more

entropy it must dissipate in order to maintain its existence. Conversely,

each system has an upper limit, due to its level of

complexity, of how much entropy it can dissipate.

This is a key point.

If the fluctuations from the environment increase beyond

that limit, the system, unable to disperse enough entropy

into its environment, begins to become internally more entropic, or chaotic.



If the excessive fluctuations continue, the chaos

eventually becomes so great that the system begins to break

down until finally a point is reached where the slightest

nudge can bring the whole system grinding to a halt.


This point, which Prigogine called a bifurcation point -- bifurcate means

to divide into two branches -- is a decision point, a moment of truth.

Either the system totally breaks down and ceases to exist as an organized

system or it spontaneously reorders itself in an entirely new way.

Incredibly, this reorganization is non-causal and non-linear with what

went before -- it is in no way predictable from prior conditions. Only the

probability of a certain outcome can be determined. The change is a true

quantum leap, a death and re-birth, and the main characteristic of the new

system is that it has the capability to handle the fluctuations, the input

from the environment, that caused the initial overwhelm and eventual

break-down of the old system. In Prigogine's words, the system "escapes

into a higher order."



Out of chaos comes a new order, a more evolved system. This new system has

a new stability and is able to more easily exist in the previously

overwhelming high fluctuation environment. But if fluctuations increase

again to a level beyond the system's new and higher capacity for dispersion

of entropy, the process will repeat, resulting in new internal chaos and

another reorganization at a new and yet more evolved level.

The human brain is a dissipative structure.





The mind and spirit of man advance when he is tried by suffering. The more the ground is ploughed the better the seed will grow, the better the harvest will be. Just as the plough furrows the earth deeply, purifying it of weeds and thistles, so suffering and tribulation free man from the petty affairs of this worldly life until he arrives at a state of complete detachment. His attitude in this world will be that of divine happiness. Man is, so to speak, unripe: the heat of the fire of suffering will mature him. Look back to the times past and you will find that the greatest men have suffered most.


ScillyMission does not have a Nintendo 3DS / Nintendo 3DS friend code.

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