Charles Bennett, Definition of Organization and Complexity

Bennett: there is a difference between dissipation (irreversible net increase in entropy) and reversible transfers of entropy.
: "it is usually more practical to stop a moving car with breaks than by saving its kinetic energy in a flywheel."
: Neurons have poor efficiency, dissipating about 10^11 kT per discharge, explained by macroscopic size.
: On the other hand, the molecular apparatus of DNA replication, transcription and protein synthesis, whose components are truly microscopic, has a realatively high energy efficiency, dissipating 20-100 kT per nucleotide or amino acid inserted under physiological conditions.


: In the modern world view, thermodynamic driving forces, such as the temperature difference between the hot sun and the cold night sky, have taken over one of the functions of God: they make matter transcend its clod-like nature and behave instead in dramatic and unforseen ways, for example molding itself into thunderstorms, people, and umbrellas.
: Organization defined as "logical depth", a notion based on algorithmic information and computational time complexity.
: Logical depth is the number of steps in the deductive or causal path connecting a thing with its plausible origin.
: Candidates for definitions of "organization" and "complexity" can be divided into those based on function and those based on structure.


: In spite of the well-known ability of dissipative systems to lower their entropy at the expense of their surroundings, flouting the spirit of the second law while they obey its letter, organization cannot be directly identified with thermodynamic potentials such as entropy or free energy: the human body is intermediate in entropy between a crystal and a gas...
: Subjective organization seems to obey a "slow growth law" which states that, except by a lucky accident, organization cannot increase quickly in any deterministic or probabilistic process, but it can increase slowly...This in turn, means that subjective organization is not additive: 1 bacterium contains much more organization than 0 bacteria, but 2 sibling bacteria contain about the same as 1.
: an object's information content is the number of bits required to specify it uniquely -- as distinction, as a "self-contained unity" (Rosenzweig, pg. 11)
FN (on "The new world Nietzsche unlocked to reason, beyond the orbit described by ethics."): "Now a self-contained unity rebelled against this totality which encloses the All as a unity, and extorted its withdrawal as a singularity, as the singular life of the singular person. The All can thus no longer claim to be all: it has forfeited its uniqueness." Pg. 11
FN (Lebensanschauung vs. Weltanschauung): "One must acknowledge the otherworldliness of the new inquiry as against everything which the concept of ethics hitherto solely meant and solely was meant to mean, the more so if one wants the spiritual achievement of the past to count for everything which it accomplishd rather than to destroy it in a riot of blind destructiveness. A way of looking at life (Lebensanschauung) confronts a way of looking at the world (Weltanschauung). Ethics is and remains a part of the Weltanschauung. Its special relationship with a life-focused point of view is only that of a particularly intimate contradiction, just because both seem to touch each other, indeed repeatedly claim mutually to solve the problems of the other together with their own. It remains to be shown in what sense this is actually the case. But the contrast of the life-centered and the world-centered points of view comes down so sharply to a contrast with the ethical portion of the world-centered view that one is inclined to designate questions of the life view as veritably meta-ethical." pg. 11
[Me: Lebensanschauung = Myworld, Weltanschauung = Ourworld]