• IninewCrow@lemmy.caEnglish
    131·
    9 days ago

    Nature
    - - - -
    Intelligence

    I’m Indigenous Canadian and I grew up with my family in a traditional wilderness setting in Northern Ontario. Some of the most beautiful, pristine garden like environments I’ve ever seen are just random untouched wilderness locations that has never seen logging, mining or development. Especially at the height of summer when everything is in bloom … these are places that look like manicured, intelligently designed and almost artificial sanctuaries that were planted by someone or a group of people, and they stretches for miles. As humans, we can recreate this beauty in pockets or well tended gardens, but nature does it automatically all over the planet without our intervention, and often in spite of our ignorance.

    There’s nothing wrong with the planet or the environment … it will survive and live without us for millions and billions of years - no matter what we do it.

    There’s something terribly wrong with us.

        • NaibofTabr@infosec.pubEnglish
          1·
          9 days ago

          Hmm, perhaps, but personally I have a problem with this expression that there is “something terribly wrong with us”. It feels awfully close to the Christian guilt-tripping nonsense of original sin that I grew up with. It’s a waste of time, and sanity.

    • sexybenfranklin@ttrpg.networkEnglish
      4·
      8 days ago

      Really? Because a tree losing a limb or having all its needles fall off would definitely be considered an irreversible process and absolutely an increase in entropy in a thermodynamic system

      • UnityDevice@lemmy.zipEnglish
        31·
        7 days ago

        I’m thinking about it more in a mathematical sense where the bottom system is more ordered by being more specific and having fewer analogous configurations. I’m possibly using the wrong terms here, but basically if you make a slight change to the top system, it will more likely remain analogous to the previous state than the bottom one. For example if you rotate one of the needles in the top image, it’s still the same thing, but if you rotate a needle in the bottom one it no longer matches the very specific pattern that it did before.

        • sexybenfranklin@ttrpg.networkEnglish
          2·
          7 days ago

          Yes, you’re just using the wrong term. Entropy isn’t chaos, it’s a measure of how much energy has been lost to irreversible processes such that the energy can no longer be used to do work. You can’t undo pulling the tree branch into its component pieces, the process is irreversible.

          • UnityDevice@lemmy.zipEnglish
            1·
            7 days ago

            The term entropy isn’t wrong here, I was more referring to the other terms I was using. “Entropy” itself is heavily overloaded as a term, and some uses of it relate to information theory and combinatorics, i.e. information entropy, configuration entropy etc.
            That’s the reasoning I’m going by here - in those uses the entropy of a system is directly proportional to the log of possible combinations a system can have, and clearly the bottom system is a lot more constrained than the top one.

      • Whats_your_reasoning@lemmy.world
        21·
        8 days ago

        But that natural process is not what happened here? Needles don’t fall off trees and line themselves up neatly into rows like the picture.

        • prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone
          3·
          8 days ago

          They’re just being placed in some kind of order, visually, but it doesn’t mean the same as “order” in the entropic sense.

          As the other person said, the process need not be natural.