Lately I've been seeing 'extropy' thrown around a lot. But what about 'negative entropy'? It's based on science rather than philosophy, and if you take the opposite of a word its meaning is implicit. Coining too many new words makes people seem incoherent to those not immersed in a culture.
Taking complex phenomena into a single word or phrase always presents high degrees of context loss. Whether 'vitality' or 'intersectionality' or 'founder mode' — their original truths become merely bannerposts for people to align themselves and fight over. Very old phrases gave action and direction: "You reap what you sow" or "United we stand, divided we fall."
Since modern institutions are based upon science as theology, it may be advantageous to create a framework based upon this existing theme with some classics thrown in.
>>3748 I believe Land popularized it, borrowing from Sean Carroll's concept of time flow and connection to entropy/negentropy (the latter term being coined by Schrödinger). Afaict the term extropy was coined by futurist Tom Bell in 1988. I don't see a problem with it, any more than using the term negative entropy. What are your specific qualms anon ?
I can't be counted on to describe precisely what he's going for, but it might be good to read Bernard Stiegler, who, after Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, organized his late philosophy around negentropy/"neganthropy" and the idea of producing local, finite, open islands of order within economically, psychically, technologically entropic systems.
> Coining too many new words makes people seem incoherent to those not immersed in a culture.
• A proponent for clear writing to make ideas broadly accessible • To derive action from phrases (allows for directional alignment) rather than reducing things down to a single word (only shows in-group/out-group) • To wonder about the fundamental texts of whatever comes next. Despite their popularity among this crowd, I don't feel Land/Yarvin/Deutsch are as great writers as the classics themselves. Too many words, not enough reality for me.
Extropianism is hopelessly mired in bad 1990s scifi transhumanist ideology. But "extropy" itself appears to be just a somewhat laden synonym for negative entropy, which according to its creator (schrodinger) is just intended to be a more open-ended and less technical synonym of free energy or free enthalpy, which is quite well defined. If taken as the narrow technical definition, it seems fine. It even seems fine in the context of his theory of life as an engine that consumes and produces extropy.
The more broad philosophical concept of extropy is the one that distinguishes living and dead, local entropic time reversal, etc. That's what people broadly mean by "order" and "complexity" when saying things like the purpose of life is to increase complexity in the universe. (Pic related: order vs chaos, but what exactly has changed? Is the entropy meaningfully different?) This concept is both very obviously real (life insists on itself whether or not you believe in it!), but also undefinable to the point of being pseudoscientific.
I think we should avoid pseudoscience, which is when we try to pretend that our holistic moral or superstitious concepts are actually scientific concepts. On the other hand we should of course try to work towards rigorous scientific concepts where we can. The difference is subtle and hard to tell. But we do also need the more vague holistic concepts at least to the point that ideas like "life" are not sufficiently formalized yet (maybe ever, given the ever-changing escape-out-the-side nature of it).
This is why I use terms like "life" instead of "extropy" or "complexity". We all know what we mean by life and life-affirming, even if they are hard to define. It is at least an every day phenomenon. There is a self-defining loop of autocatalysis that evades any particular box you might put it in but is nonetheless very real and the source of much that is beautiful and valuable in the world. But it's also clearly a religious and moral concept to some extent.
(I have noticed recently that a particular sort of atheist for example tends to outright deny that life is a real phenomenon that exists independently of our concepts of it. It's all just chemicals bopping around or something. I call this a form of atheism because it appears to come from a belief that reality can't be trusted to be good or consistent, and is premised on the implicit belief that reality can and will be overwritten and goodhart-optimized by our concepts, so if they aren't good enough to capture the entire nature of the thing, it won't have any continued existence and is thus not a robust phenomenon. But someone who actually believes something like this can elaborate)
I similarly like the term "gnon", which is openly and unapologetically theological, while also being ontologically minimalistic and grounded in acknowledged uncertainty and agnosticism. It's not trying to be scientific-sounding, though is rigorously compatible with scientific concepts. I find this to be a more productive way to handle those more moral and metaphysical matters than pseudoscientific overextension of ideas like negentropy.
