Philosophers Must Reckon with the Meaning of Thermodynamics

Posted5 months agoActive4 months ago

nis0s

7 points

6 comments

aeon.coResearchstory

skepticalmixed

Debate

60/100

ThermodynamicsPhilosophyEthics

Key topics

Thermodynamics

Philosophy

Ethics

The article discusses the implications of thermodynamics on philosophical thought, sparking debate among commenters about the author's conclusions and methodology.

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Aug 23, 2025 at 4:34 AM EDT
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4 months ago
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Discussion (6 comments)

Showing 6 comments

JonathanRaines

5 months ago

1 reply

> "According to the laws of thermodynamics, all that exists does so solely to consume, destroy and extinguish, and in this way to accelerate the slide toward cosmic obliteration"

Bit of a leap from "heat cannon, of itself, pass from one body to a hotter body"?

justonceokay

4 months ago

Also it misses the most important thing: thermodynamics is what lets our complicated processes exist in the first place. The mental model I use is that when you first drop food coloring into water there is low entropy. After an hour it is mixed—high entropy. But in the middle is when you get the complicated swirling structures. In the cosmic sense those swirls represent stars and galaxies and life.

Thermodynamics giveth, not only taketh away

OgsyedIE

5 months ago

The author analyses thermodynamics in the context of life almost half as deeply as Bataille, G.C. Williams or Odum yet neglects to put the same rigor to dissecting the moral qualifiers they throw around like benevolent, joyful, horror and evil.

Who's to say that degrading exergy is strongly or weakly aligned with good or evil, or that good and evil are opposites? Is degrading exergy entirely orthogonal to good and evil, like the gnostics articulate? These are open philosophical questions that the author would do better to contextualise if this essay were to be more than an incomplete survey.

karmakaze

4 months ago

I understand that Aeon is for those who enjoy the act of reading. Even still it would be appreciated to have clearer foundations.

Between this false dichotomy good/evil, and the implicit premise that thermodynamics has a meaning, it's all word salad to me.

> Reality is good.

> But what would our metaphysics and ethics look like if we learned that reality was against us?

I prefer the view of Samsara in Buddhism as the endless, cyclic process--a framework describing the continuous cycle of existence with no inherent or ultimate meaning or purpose within itself. The cycle operates according to mechanistic laws.

Maybe I'm just triggered, gatekeeping thermodynamics as a topic that literary folk shouldn't be having feelings about? Get off my lawn!

metalman

5 months ago

the universe is infinite, there, reconed with

wolvesechoes

4 months ago

I think philosophers should start actually learning about things there are writing about and base their conclusions on.

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ID: 44994366Type: storyLast synced: 11/18/2025, 12:02:45 AM

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