Dissipate or Concentrate

One of the more elegant but ultimately meaningless descriptions of “life” is as the activity of dissipative structures. The phrase belongs to Ilya Prigogine, the Russian-born Belgian physicist; he won the 1980 Nobel Prize for this description. So what is it that living structures dissipate? Energy. Prigogine studied what are called open systems, thus systems in motion but in disequilibrium. A river is such a system—a lake is not. He discovered that if you apply shocks to such a system, by further disarranging it, that intervention causes matter to organize itself. Let’s put a big boulder into the middle of a shallow, fast-flowing brook. The boulder compresses water between the bank and itself. Turbulence results. If the water keeps on flowing with the same force as before, vortices will form. They will retain their shapes while the water is flowing. Turbulence is water’s way of shedding, dissipating an excess of energy. In a manner of speaking, those vortices are alive—and remain so until the energy, produced by water and gravity, diminish. From such beginnings have arisen concepts such as the “self-organizing” character of matter. Life processes, therefore, are defined as dissipative structures at the chemical level. We are merely vortices in matter of a certain complex kind.

The meaningless character of this description arises because it views life as merely a byproduct of matter in the presence of energy. But life, of course, has a certain tricky originality as well. Vortices may form in brooks, but they don’t reproduce—certainly not by extraordinary complex routes requiring two sexes and the combination of two sets of DNA; or, at the simpler level, by separating twin strands of DNA and then, rebuilding them, parceling them out, one to one and the other to the other half of a dividing cell.

But life, surely, is a great feeder. Yes. It gobbles energy. It sheds, dissipates it not only in maintaining itself but in all kinds of other more entertaining activities galore—like texting with the thumb while driving a car. And this activity, the continuous use of energy, is certainly one description, and an accurate one, of what life does.

What’s in that energy? Suppose we make a slight adjustment to the conventional description. Suppose there is in energy—hidden within it somewhere—a subtle form of stuff that we need to develop ourselves as souls. Then, finding ourselves at the bottom of some vast dark cosmic chasm—probably because we strayed—and finding ourselves quite starved of the nutrition we really need, we began a process of concentrating energy in just the right way to extract that subtle substance from the coarse stuff reaching us from the sun—in order to help us climb out of the pit. And chemical civilization is born. In this slight adjustment of the materialistic view of life—without in any way changing its description—we introduce an intervention, our own. It is we who drop the bolder into that rapidly flowing brook—not mere chance. It is because we are involved, agents with a purposive nature, that life display a few more curious innovations, like reproduction, that we do not observe in the inorganic ranges.

Dissipate or Concentrate? What if our task is both. We dissipate the energy to get more that still holds the vital stuff we need to take wing out of the valley of the shadow.