June 29, 2003
Life is locally decreasing entropy

Tim Bray comments on Wiki's.

The weird thing about the Wiki work is that successive refactorings appear to produce coherent structure out of chaos via the sum of a lot of independent collective action. Which feels like it ought somehow to be a violation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics

This seem to as good a definition as anything of what life, and consciousness is all about: Living systems are local entropy reversers. Phrase adopted.

UPDATE: Silly me. This was of course already an appropriated phrase. Even in the semi-mainstream literature. Which of course I knew (sort of) but I just liked the fortuituos connection of this fact with my recent posting rampage on consciousness (check the last 4-5 days worth of posts)

Posted by Claus at June 29, 2003 12:48 PM
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