Behavioral Thermodynamics Part 1: Beyond the 4th Law?
Frankly #117
In this week’s Frankly, I take thermodynamics out of the physics classroom, utilizing its principles to explain the invisible forces behind growth, competition, and complexity in our world. Competing life systems build organization out of chaos in order to maximize power usage today, even if it potentially undermines survival tomorrow. Within our energetic reality of finite and destabilizing fossil fuels, this tendency towards instant power accelerates us towards planetary overshoot.
I pose a question in response to this tendency: What happens when a species becomes conscious of the self-fulfilling drive to maximize energy flow? I suggest a “fifth law” of thermodynamics, which explains that a self-aware species might evolve to consciously prioritize future security over short-term gains. This “law” serves as a hopeful and mind-expanding invitation to rethink efficiency, progress, and wisdom in the world we experience today.
What invisible energy gradients steer your daily habits and decisions? Could a culture actually choose slower, steadier flows without collapsing creativity, freedom, or joy? And, if intelligence doesn’t guarantee wisdom, what feedbacks might help us prefer enduring power over maximum power?
In case you missed it…
In this week’s episode, I reflected on four years (!) of the podcast by answering listener-submitted questions, which cover a broad range of topics related to The Great Simplification. I invite you to investigate how to navigate a complex and ever-changing world, while avoiding overly prescriptive solutions that brush aside personal agency and the inherent uncertainty that exists in our world.
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It appears that Lotka’s and Odum’s maximum power principle has a social expression that is currently being discussed at bioregional levels in many places. Across most of the planet now, the organization of *sovereign authority over territory and law* is suppressing community self-determination as a recognized right and practical capacity to set, revise and enforce the rules by which regional communities use and care for a shared resource or commons, including water, land, forests, fisheries, seeds, knowledge or cultural practices. In biophysical terms, there is an evolving recognition that self-determination strengthens local feedback control when decisions are made closer to the ecological signals (seasonality, regeneration rates, scarcity, contamination, conflict), so that rules can adapt faster and reduce waste, leakage and enforcement friction. We see this lack of quality power now in sovereign nations through the growing cries of their citizens for food and water self-governance, cultural self-determination or commons self-organization, which signal the recognized right and practical capacity of communities to govern their commons.
While Elinor Ostrom’s never used the word “sovereignty” as a label for the rights of communities to self-organize their resources, her work clearly demonstrates this autonomy as an optimum balance between rate and efficiency, not “maximum extraction”. Ostrom's standard phrasing for this local/regional subsidiarity is closer to community jurisdiction, self-governance, self-organization or self-determination -- a “recognition of the rights of users to organize” (one of her well-known design principles). This expresses the legitimate authority to conduct community decision-making through polycentric/nested governance without implying supreme state-like control. This is why today’s bioregional movement can be read as an emerging expression of social governance through the maximum power principle, that systems tend to persist when they *organize to maximize sustained useful throughput* under real constraints. It's evident that national sovereignty (est. 1648) will not go away easily, but natural selection is favoring system configurations that maximize useful energy flux (power) subject to planetary limits. Sovereign states have strived for maximum efficiency but have failed to deliver; what is needed now is an optimum tradeoff that yields the highest sustained power throughput. This new social contract will require that all persons and communities have the right, consistent with ecological limits and the rights of others, to participate in and shape the governance of the resources that sustain their lives, livelihoods, and cultures—and to have their commons institutions recognized and protected against dispossession and arbitrary interference.
I wrote three books about what you're calling the Fifth Law. You're speaking about Non-Egoic Knowing, which is how nature and existence is experienced and known without Ego. In the third volume of the series I discuss how the laws of thermodynamics and entropy are understood when experienced without Ego.
The scientific, analytic mind has the most trouble seeing how philosophy and spirituality are essential for perceiving a Non-Egoic Scientific Method. Academics have to learn how to think without Ego, which is easier said that done. Without good information the attempt can drive one insane.
https://noegoodyssey.com/