Unsentimental Sentiment

Darwin’s Denial of Dynamics (False Hope)

Hope is great. I want to be hopeful about my future in this life and the life after. But false hope is not great; false hope is evil.
(Don’t read this post if you have blissful hope in human progress and the inexorable continuation of life).

Consider these three laws of energy:

1. The Law of Conservation, that nothing could be added, and nothing lost, in the sum of energy.
2. The Law of Dissipation, that nothing could be added, but that Intensity must always be lost.
3. The Law of Elevation, that Vital Energy could be added, and raised indefinitely in potential, without the smallest apparent compensation.

The third law is an add-on, crafted ex post facto to give people meaning in life.

If Darwin could believe in this Vital Energy because it gave him meaning, then so be it. But I don’t have enough faith in it to contradict the Law of Dissipation.

Why would Darwin believe in Vital Energy? Doesn’t it seem a bit ad hoc-ish?

Yes, but Darwin was not a physicist or mathematician. He wasn’t as cognizant of the laws of energy as a physicist would be. That’s why Darwin could add this Vital Energy just at the moment his universe needed it. Darwin’s Law of Elevation is a contradiction to the Law of Degradation. But who was behind that?

William Thomson (1824-1907), aka Lord Kelvin, was the guy behind the Law of Dissipation/Degradation (second law). He was, of course, a physicist and a mathematician. His paper on “A universal tendency in Nature to the Dissipation of Energy” was published in 1852 (28 yrs old!). But, forget his credentials if you are a pudgy modern who cares less for the truth than your smug intellectual arrogance. Just go on believing you have meaning. Go on trusting that the Law of Degradation doesn’t wipe out anything you ever do in your meaningless existence. Go on. Forget Lord Kelvin’s credentials and solid logic. And forget the fact that physicists follow the first two laws of energy. And forget the fact that Darwin’s third law of energy (the law of elevation) is a direct contradiction of the first two. Just go on with your false hope.

Transcendental Realism

But just in case your not a brain-dead dystopian dinosaur, then listen to the pessimistic reaction of the transcendentalist realist Eduard von Hartmann:

“If the social consciousness (read vital energy) of today rebels so strongly against the thought that vital processes will come to an end in the world, the chief reason is because society has indeed absorbed the first principle of thermodynamics,—the conservation of energy,—but not the second, the progressive degradation of energy by dissipation and leveling of intensities; and, in consequence, has erroneously interpreted the first law as though it contained an eternal guaranty of the endlessness of vital processes. . . In reality, the only question is whether, in the actual result, the world-process will work itself out slowly in prodigious lapse of time, according to purely physical laws; or whether it will find its end by means of some metaphysical resource when it has reached its culminating point. Only in the last case would its end coincide with the fulfillment of a purpose or object; in the first case, a long period of purposeless existence would follow after the culmination of life.” (Ausgewahlte Werke, vin, pp. 572-573. Leipzig, 1904.)

Oh, but why don’t you just bury your head and pretend that the world will go on forever.