Imagine a universe where everything is constantly moving towards disorder, a state of chaos and randomness. This is the world of entropy, a fundamental concept in physics that describes the tendency of systems to become more disordered over time. It’s the cosmic clock ticking down, a force that seems to be driving everything towards a state of ultimate disarray.
The Second Law of Thermodynamics: A Universal Truth
The second law of thermodynamics, one of the most fundamental laws of physics, states that the entropy of an isolated system will never decrease. This means that the universe, as a whole, is constantly becoming more disordered, more chaotic. It’s a law that governs everything from a cup of coffee cooling down to the expansion of the universe itself.
The Challenge of Entropy:
The increase in entropy poses a challenge to everything we hold dear – order, structure, and even happiness. It’s the reason our rooms get messy, our cars break down, and our bodies age. It’s the force that drives towards decay, disintegration, and ultimately, the heat death of the universe.
The Human Fight Against Entropy:
But we humans are not passive observers in this cosmic dance of entropy. We are creatures of order, driven by a desire to create, to build, and to maintain. We fight against the relentless march of entropy through our ingenuity, our knowledge, and our technology.
The Power of Information:
Through the process of evolution, life has developed remarkable ways to combat entropy. DNA, the blueprint of life, encodes information that allows organisms to replicate and pass on their traits, resisting the tendency towards disorder. Our brains, complex networks of neurons, are information-processing machines, allowing us to learn, adapt, and create.
The Role of Knowledge and Technology:
We use our knowledge and technology to create order and control. We build houses, bridges, and cities, defying the forces of nature. We develop medicines, cure diseases, and extend our lifespans, pushing back against the inevitable decay of our bodies. We harness energy, create machines, and explore the universe, striving to understand and control the forces that govern our existence.
A Universe of Order and Disorder
The universe is a complex tapestry of order and disorder, a battleground where the forces of entropy constantly clash with the forces of life and intelligence. While entropy may seem like an unstoppable force, we humans, driven by our insatiable curiosity and our desire to create, are constantly pushing back, striving to maintain order and build a better future. The journey is ongoing, the battle is never-ending, but the human spirit, fueled by knowledge and ingenuity, will continue to fight against the relentless march of entropy.
Entropy
The first basic concept for understanding the human condition is entropy, or disorder. The concept of entropy originated in 19th-century physics, where physicist Ludwig Boltzmann gave it its current meaning. The second law of thermodynamics tells us that the entropy of an isolated system, that is, a system that does not undergo any energy transfer or material exchange with the outside world, will never decrease. A closed system will inevitably become more and more chaotic, scattered, useless, and ineffective until it falls into a state of silent, monotonous equilibrium, and remains in this state.
The second law of thermodynamics was originally developed to describe the consumption of available energy. When there is a temperature difference between two objects, the heat, that is, the available energy, will inevitably eventually be dissipated as heat transfers from the higher temperature object to the lower temperature object. As Flanders and Swann sang: “Heat cannot be transferred from a low-temperature object to a high-temperature object. You can try it if you like, but I advise you to forget it.” Indeed, a cup of coffee It will eventually cool down unless you keep it warm in an electric stove. Likewise, when the coal supply to a steam engine burns out, the cold steam on one side of the piston can no longer push it because the hot steam and air on the other side are pushing back in the opposite direction.
Imagine you have two boxes filled with marbles. The marbles in one box run fast, which represents heat; the marbles in the other box, which run slowly, represent cold. When you connect two boxes, the marbles will mix with each other, and the fast ones will become slower and the slower ones will become faster. In the end, the marbles in the two boxes ran at about the same speed, and the temperatures were the same. This is the second law of thermodynamics, heat always flows from hot places to cold places until they balance. In this process, the marbles go from ordered (one box is hot, one box is cold) to disordered (both boxes are at the same temperature). Because the marbles can run around in many more ways than they can line up, the system always tends to be messier, not neater. This is what increasing entropy means.
From a probabilistic perspective, any change in the system, whether it is a random swing of a certain part or interference from the outside, will push the system into disorder or failure. This is not because nature intends this, but because of disorder . The number of states is much more than that of order.
Suppose you pass a sandcastle today, it may not be there tomorrow, because sea wind, tides, seagulls, or children may change the state of the sandcastle, and in most cases this change will destroy the sandcastle. No longer like a sandcastle. I often refer to the statistical version of the second law of thermodynamics as the law of entropy, which can be used to explain not only thermal equilibrium but also the loss of order.
What does entropy have to do with human affairs?
Life and happiness depend on an ordered arrangement of extremely small probabilities among an infinite number of possibilities. Our body is a combination of molecules with extremely low probability. They maintain their own order with the help of other extremely small probability factors. Some of them form food and provide us with nutrition, while others form other living materials to meet our daily needs. Basic needs such as clothing and housing and various hobbies. Most of the natural arrangements on Earth have no practical use for us.
Therefore, when things change, if there is no one to guide the change, the change is likely to develop for the bad. The second law of thermodynamics is widely reflected in various proverbs in daily life, such as “Things fall apart,” “Rust never sleeps,” “Bad things happen,” “Water overflows,” “If something can go wrong, it will go wrong,” and Texas Congressman Sam Rayburn’s famous quote: “Any fool can knock down a barn, but only a carpenter can build it.”
But scientists realize that the second law of thermodynamics can be used to explain more than just daily life. It is also the basis for understanding the universe and our place in it. In 1928, physicist Arthur Eddington wrote:
I believe that the law of ever-increasing entropy should be the highest law of all laws in nature. If someone tells you that your preferred theory of the universe doesn’t agree with Maxwell’s equations, then maybe there’s a problem with Maxwell’s equations. If your theory contradicts experimental results, then maybe the experimenter screwed up. But if your theory violates the second law of thermodynamics, there’s no hope and there’s no other outcome than collapsing in deep shame.
In 1959, the British scientist and novelist CP Snow delivered his famous speech “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution”, in which he addressed the well-educated people at that time. The British despised science was satirized:
Many times I have attended gatherings of people who, according to traditional cultural standards, are considered to be well-educated people, who often feel gloating and disbelief at the ignorance of scientists. Once or twice I got annoyed and asked how many of them could explain the second law of thermodynamics. The response was very cold and no one could answer. However, when I ask this question, it is actually like asking a scientist: Have you read Shakespeare’s works?
Likewise, chemist Peter Atkins wrote a book called Four Laws That Drive the Universe, of which the second law of thermodynamics was one. What’s more, evolutionary psychologists John Tooby, Leda Cosmides, and Clark Barrett recently wrote a paper exploring the theory of mind science Basics, the title is “The Second Law of Thermodynamics Is the First Law of Psychology”.
Why should we respect the second law of thermodynamics? Because from a metaphysical point of view, the second law determines the fate of the universe, and also determines the ultimate goal of life, thought, and human endeavor: to use energy and knowledge to fight the waves of entropy and create a shelter for valuable order. . Of course, starting from a metaphysical point of view, one can draw more concrete conclusions, but before entering familiar territory, I need to point out two other basic concepts.
Evolution
The second basic concept is evolution.
At first glance, the law of entropy seems to compel us to accept a depressing history and a hopeless future. The universe originated from a low-entropy state with incredible energy density, which is the so-called Big Bang. From that point on, as the universe expanded, everything declined, and will continue to do so, eventually dissipating into thin particles floating in space. However, as we can see, the universe is not a pot of lifeless gruel, but a world full of life. There are not only galaxies, stars, planets, mountains, clouds and snowflakes in the universe, but also colorful Plants and animals, and of course us.
One of the reasons why the universe is filled with so many interesting things is that there is a set of processes called “self-organization” that can achieve order in a limited area. When energy is injected into a system, and the system consumes this energy in the process of entropy increase, it will show an orderly and beautiful shape, such as sphere, spiral, starburst, vortex , ripples, crystals, or fractals. Incidentally, the fact that we consider these structures aesthetic suggests that beauty does not exist solely in the eye of the beholder, and that the brain’s aesthetic response may be an acceptance of various anti-entropic forms in nature.
But there is another kind of order in nature, and it is necessary to explain here: it is not the elegant symmetry and rhythm in the physical world, but the functional design in the living world. Living things are composed of different organs, and these organs have heterogeneous components. They are incredibly arranged together and perform their own duties to ensure the survival of living things. In other words, they constantly absorb energy to resist The erosion of entropy.
Eyes are often used as an example to demonstrate the wonders of biological design, but I decided to demonstrate the point this time using my second favorite sense organ, the ear. The human ear contains an elastic eardrum that reacts to vibrating at the slightest disturbance. In addition, there is a lever system composed of ossicles in the human ear to amplify the power of vibration; and a piston device to press vibration into the lymph fluid in a long tunnel, which is usually coiled into a roll and contained in Within the skull. Along this tunnel is a gradually narrowing membrane that separates the waveform into harmonics. In addition, there is a row of cells with cilia on the membrane. They bend back and forth as the vibrating membrane vibrates, thereby dividing a stream of electrons. The impulses travel to the brain.
Clearly, it is this delicate structure that allows the brain to record patterned sounds, and only understanding this fact can explain why these membranes, bones, fluids and cilia fit together in such bizarre ways. The same is true for the outer ear. Its shape is not symmetrical and has crisscrossing grooves. This is for a reason, because it helps the brain distinguish whether sounds are coming from above or below, in front or behind.
Organisms possess incredible organs such as eyes, ears, hearts, and stomachs, all of which are in desperate need of explanation. Before Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace proposed their explanation in 1859, it seemed reasonable to think it was the work of a divine designer. But Darwin and Wallace made the designer unnecessary. Once some physical and chemical self-organization process creates a self-replicating material structure, the replication will repeat itself again and again, with exponential growth. This replicating system will compete for resources to replicate itself, as well as energy to accelerate its replication.
Thanks to the law of entropy, the copying process cannot be perfect, and errors often occur suddenly. However, although most mutations will reduce the effectiveness of the replicator because of the law of entropy, it is also possible that the replicator becomes more effective by accident, and its offspring will be greatly increased and survive the competition. The replication errors that contribute to increased stability and replication rates accumulate over generations, making the replicating systems known as organisms appear to be specifically designed for future survival and reproduction. In fact, they simply retained the copying errors that allowed their ancestors to survive and reproduce. Our bodies and organs are not designed by a designer, but are formed by nature slowly changing over a long period of time. These changes make organisms better suited to survive and reproduce.
Creationists often distort the meaning of the second law of thermodynamics and use it to claim that cumulative biological evolution over time is impossible. What they deliberately ignore is the premise of this law, which is “in a closed system”, while organisms are open systems: they obtain energy from sunlight, food, or hydrothermal vents in the ocean to maintain their bodies and The temporary order of the nest, while expelling heat and waste into the environment, thereby increasing the disorder of the entire world. The living organism uses energy to maintain its integrity against the pressure of entropy. This is a modern interpretation of the doctrine of libido, which Spinoza defined as “the effort to maintain and develop one’s own being.” It is also The basis for certain theories of life and mind during the Age of Enlightenment.
Organisms must draw energy from the environment, and this rigid need is one of the causes of various tragedies in the biological world. Plants absorb solar energy by bathing in sunlight, and some deep-sea creatures absorb the rich chemicals gushing out of cracks in the seafloor; while animals are natural exploiters: they absorb the hard-won energy stored in the bodies of plants and other animals and use it to Make a living.
The same goes for viruses, bacteria, and other pathogens and parasites, which eat their hosts inside the body. Except for fruits, those things called “food” are parts of the body or energy storage of other creatures, and these creatures are reluctant to give up these valuable assets.
Nature is a war, and what fascinates us most about the natural world is the arms race. Predators use hard shells, spines, claws, horns, venom, camouflage, flight, or fighting to defend themselves. Plants protect themselves with spikes, hard skins, or secrete irritating and toxic substances. Animals have evolved weapons to defeat these defenses: carnivores have speed, claws, and keen vision, while herbivores rely on strong molars and a liver that can detoxify.
Information
Now let’s look at the third basic concept: information.
Information can be understood as the reduction of entropy, the element that distinguishes orderly, structured systems from the mass of random, useless systems. Imagine a monkey randomly typing out a page of characters on a typewriter, or a piece of white noise coming from the radio when it is tuned, or a bunch of garbled characters displayed due to damage to a computer file. They can have trillions of different characters. combinations, each of which is meaningless. But now imagine that these devices are controlled by a signal that combines characters, sound waves, or pixels into a pattern that is related to something external: a copy of the Declaration of Independence, or the song “Hey, Jude.” ‘s intro, or a cat wearing sunglasses. We say this signal conveys a message about a manifesto, a song, or a cat.
What kind of information a form contains depends on how refined (or coarse) the world is. If we care about the exact sequence of characters produced by a monkey, the precise differences between various types of noise, or the random garbled pattern of pixels, then we have to admit that every combination contains the same amount of information.
Indeed, meaningful forms contain less information because when you see one part, you can guess the other parts without relying on additional signals. But more often than not, you group together a large number of seemingly random and meaningless forms, distinguishing them from a small number of forms that correspond to something outside. From this perspective, a photo of a cat contains more information than those jumbled pixels, because accurately identifying a rare ordered structure from a large number of disordered forms requires a variety of predictions. Design and description. If the universe is ordered rather than random, it means that it contains information. Therefore, some physicists regard information as a basic component of the universe, alongside matter and energy.
During the process of evolution, information is continuously accumulated in the genome. The base sequence in the DNA molecule corresponds to the amino acid sequence that constitutes the protein of the organism. The bases and amino acids obtain this sequence by constructing the ancestor of the organism, that is, by reducing their entropy. They built primitive organisms into an almost impossible structure, allowing them to harvest energy, grow and reproduce.
Throughout an animal’s life, its nervous system is constantly collecting information. The ear can convert sound into neural discharges. These are originally two completely different physical processes, one is air vibration and the other is ion diffusion, but it is precisely because of the correspondence between them that the neural activity patterns of the animal brain can be carried information from outside sounds. In the brain, information can be converted from electrical properties to chemical properties and vice versa as it crosses synapses between individual neurons. Thanks to these physical transformations, information is preserved.
A major discovery in theoretical neurology in the 20th century is that neuron networks can not only store information, but also transform information in various ways, which can also explain how the brain generates intelligence. For example, two input neurons can be connected to an output neuron, with their firing patterns corresponding to logical relationships such as AND, OR, and NOT, or to statistical decisions based on weight of evidence. This gives the neural network the ability to process or calculate information. The brain is a huge network composed of countless logical and statistical circuits. It has enough space to accommodate billions of neurons, so it can perform complex function calculations, which is a prerequisite for intelligence.
The brain can transform the external information received by the sensory organs according to various laws of the external world, thereby making useful inferences and predictions. On the one hand, the internal representation forms a reliable correspondence with the state of the world, and on the other hand, it can make inferences and draw true conclusions from true premises – this is knowledge. If someone thinks of the concept of “robin” when seeing a robin, and can deduce that it usually appears in spring and likes to look for bugs on the ground to eat, it can be said that this person knows “robin”. “bird” is what.
Let’s go back to the process of biological evolution. The brain, wired according to the information in the genome, is able to compute information from the senses, so it can organize the animal’s various behaviors, enable it to obtain energy, and curb entropy. For example, it can adopt the following principle: “If it squeaks, chase it; if it barks loudly, run away.”
However, chasing and escaping are not just muscle contractions one by one, they are goal-oriented: pursuit may involve running, climbing, jumping or ambushing, depending on the circumstances, as long as it increases the chance of catching prey; escaping This may include hiding, playing dead, or running in a zigzag pattern. This leads to another important idea of the 20th century: cybernetics, or feedback theory.
This theory explains how a physical system can exhibit purposiveness, in other words, be goal or purpose oriented. It can perceive the state of itself and the environment in a certain way, and has a set of representations of the goal state, that is, what it “wantes” and what it is “fighting for”, and has the ability to calculate the difference between the current state and the goal state. Ability, and having a set of behavioral instructions that correspond to specific outcomes.
Once this system is connected, it can trigger actions that reduce the difference between the current state and the goal state, which can be seen as pursuing a goal, and if it can adequately predict the external world, it can achieve the goal. Natural selection discovered this principle and applied it in the form of homeostasis, as the body regulates its temperature through chills and sweating. Humans use this principle to design analog systems such as thermostats and cruise controls, and then apply it to digital systems such as chess programs and autonomous robots.
The principles of information, computation, and control bridge the gap between the physical world, governed by causality, and the spiritual world, whose content is knowledge, intelligence, and intention. Therefore, “Thoughts change the world” is not only a beautiful slogan, but also a fact involving the physical structure of the brain. Enlightenment thinkers had a vague view that thoughts were made of some form of matter. They compared thoughts to the marks on a wax tablet, the vibration of a piano string, or the ripples of a boat crossing the surface of a lake.
At the same time, there are still some people who believe that “reasoning is calculation” (“calculation” here is calculation in the original sense). But before the concepts of information and computation were revealed, one could be forgiven for embracing mind-body dualism and attributing spiritual life to a disembodied soul. Just like before the theory of evolution, it would have been natural for a person to become a creationist, attributing all of nature’s design to some cosmic designer.
Of course, it’s also natural to wonder whether your phone really “knows” your favorite phone number, whether your navigation system really “understands” the best route home, or whether your robot vacuum really is “trying” to clean the room.
However , as information processing systems become more sophisticated, their representations of the world become richer, their goals are refined into hierarchical subgoals, and the actions taken to achieve them become more diverse. , and more difficult to predict. In this case, insisting that they are not intelligent seems a bit human chauvinism. In addition to knowledge, intelligence, and intention, can information and computation also be used to explain human consciousness? This issue will be discussed in the final chapter.
Human intelligence remains the benchmark that these artificial intelligences strive to approach, and the reason why Homo sapiens is an extraordinary species is because our ancestors worked to expand their brains so that they could collect more external information and perform more complex tasks. Analyze reasoning and take more actions to achieve your goals.
They specialize in the “cognitive niche”—sometimes called the “cultural niche” or hunter-gatherer niche. This includes a range of new adaptive abilities, such as manipulating mental models of the external world, predicting the consequences of trying new things, and cooperating with others to accomplish tasks that cannot be accomplished individually by relying on the strength of a team. There is also language, which allows them to coordinate with each other and accumulate the fruits of their experiences into the collection of skills and norms they call culture.
These investments enabled early humans to defeat the defense systems of various plants and animals and reap the rewards of energy, which further stimulated their ever-expanding brains to give them more knowledge and thereby harvest more energy.
The Hadza tribe in Tanzania is a modern hunter-gatherer tribe that has been fully studied by scientists. This tribe was located in the ecological environment where modern humans first evolved and likely retained much of their way of life from ancient times. Each of them gets 3,000 calories a day from more than 880 species. This rich menu is obtained through humans’ ingenious and unique ways of foraging, such as bringing down large animals with poisonous arrows, using thick smoke to remove bees from hives and then removing the honey, and cooking to enhance meat and nutritional value of tubers.
Using knowledge to guide energy is an important magic weapon to curb entropy. The more energy we obtain, the better the fate of mankind. About 10,000 years ago, agriculture began to appear. People cultivated plants and domesticated livestock, which doubled the supply of calories. This freed some people from the burden of hunting and gathering, and eventually embarked on writing, thinking and accumulation. The luxurious path of knowledge.
Around 500 BC, which is what the philosopher Karl Jaspers called the “Axial Age”, several far-flung civilizations in the world began to construct their own philosophical systems and religious beliefs. Selflessness advocates spiritual transcendence, thereby bidding farewell to various sacrifices made in the past just to escape worldly misfortunes. Taoism and Confucianism in China, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism in India, Zoroastrianism in Persia, Second Temple Judaism in Judaea, and Greek philosophy and drama in the classical period, all within a century or two Emerged one after another. Among them, Confucius, Gautama Buddha, Pythagoras, Aeschylus and the last Hebrew prophet also walked on the earth at the same time.
Recently, an interdisciplinary research team discovered the reason behind this. This is not the result of spiritual light falling on the earth, but from a more prosaic power: energy acquisition . During the Axial Age, the development of agriculture and economy greatly increased the amount of calories available to people. The average person obtained more than 20,000 calories per day from food, feed, fuel, and living raw materials.
This surge allowed civilizations to afford larger cities, support an unproductive class of scholars and monks, and to adjust life’s priorities from satisfying immediate survival to maintaining long-term harmony. As the German dramatist Bertolt Brecht famously said thousands of years later: “Grub first, then ethics.”
Heaven and earth are unkind
Entropy, evolution and information, these three concepts outline the story of human progress: we are born in a miserable world, but we can improve our situation through various means.
One piece of wisdom provided by the three of them is that not all misfortunes in the world are due to someone’s fault. A major, or the biggest breakthrough of the scientific revolution was the elimination of the intuitive thinking that “the universe is full of purpose.” Although this intuition is primitive, it is extremely common.
Everything happens for a reason, so if misfortune such as accident, disease, famine, or poverty strikes, someone must want it to happen.
If someone is accused of being the culprit, he must be punished and tortured for it. If no specific individual can be found, people will blame the ethnic minorities or religious minorities around them, lynching them, or massacre them en masse. If ordinary mortals could not be prosecuted, witches would be hunted down and burned or thrown into the water. When all else fails, it is attributed to some tyrannical god, but it cannot be punished and can only be appeased by prayers and sacrifices. Therefore, there are empty forces such as karma, fate, divine punishment and other various arguments to prove the intuitive judgment that “everything happens for a reason”.
Galileo, Newton, and Laplace replaced this moral universe with a mechanical universe. In the mechanical universe, the occurrence of events is determined by current conditions, not for some prior purpose. Of course man has his own purposes, but it is an illusion to project them onto the laws of nature. Things just happen, whether or not anyone cares about the impact it will have on human happiness.
The discovery of entropy furthered the ideas of the Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment. Not only does the universe not care about our needs, but it seems to thwart it in the natural progression of events, since the chances of success are always infinitesimal and the ways in which things can go wrong are hundreds of thousands, such as houses burning down and ships burning down. Sink, or lose the war for one missing horseshoe nail.
Evolutionary explanations can also deepen our understanding of the indifference of the universe. Predators, parasites, and pathogens are always trying to prey on us, and pests and spoilage bacteria are finding ways to eat our food. We often suffer because of this, but it is certainly not their fault.
Poverty needs no explanation either. It is the default state of humanity in a world governed by entropy and evolution. Material materials do not automatically turn into houses and clothes. All kinds of birds and animals also try their best to avoid becoming human beings’ meals. As Adam Smith said, what we really need to explain is why wealth occurs. Yet even today, although no one anymore believes that there is evil behind an accident or illness, there is always debate over who is responsible when discussing poverty.
This is not to say that hostility does not exist in the natural world. Rather, evolution has dictated that hostility is ubiquitous. Natural selection itself is the competition between genes to perpetuate themselves in the next generation. All the creatures we see today are descended from victors, their ancestors besting rivals in competition for mates, food, and dominance. But this does not mean that creatures are greedy at all times. According to the explanation of modern evolutionary theory , selfish genes can create selfless creatures, but this selflessness has a scale. Unlike cells in the body or individuals in a group of organisms, humans are genetically unique in that each person has accumulated and reorganized a series of different mutations that emerged from the entropy-prone replication process of our ancestors from generation to generation. among.
Individualizing genes gives each person different tastes and needs, but it also creates the conditions for conflict. Families, spouses, friends, alliances, and society often have conflicts due to their own interests, and these conflicts are often resolved through confrontation, arguments, and even more extreme means.
Another implication of the law of entropy is that a complex system like an organism is easily incapacitated because it must satisfy many conditions simultaneously, each of which is not easy to achieve. All it takes is a stone to the head, a hand to the throat, or a poisoned arrow to the body to end the game. For creatures with language, competition is even more tempting because they can force opponents into submission through verbal threats of force, which opens the door to oppression and exploitation.
Evolution has also created a burden: our cognitive, emotional, and moral abilities are only suitable for individual survival and reproduction in ancient environments, and are not adapted to the ever-changing modern society. To understand this, you don’t have to think of yourself as an anachronistic caveman; you just have to understand that evolution takes place over long generations, so it hasn’t had time to modify our brains to adapt to modern technologies and institutions. The cognitive abilities that humans rely on were once easy to cope with in traditional societies, but today they appear to be full of loopholes.
Human beings are born illiterate and mathematically illiterate. They are accustomed to quantifying the world with “one, two and many” and prefer rough estimates rather than precise calculations. They believe that the secrets behind everything in the world do not come from the laws of physics and biology, but from the magic of sympathy, that is, an object can transcend time and space and affect objects similar to it, or objects it has come into contact with before. (Such as those beliefs held by the British before the Scientific Revolution).
Wealth
Economist Peter Bauer once wrote: “Poverty has no cause, wealth has a trace. ” In a world governed by entropy and evolution, the streets are not paved with pastries and neither are cooked fish. Falling at our feet. But it’s easy to forget this truth and take it for granted that wealth is always with us. History is not so much written by the victors as it is written by the rich.
The rich were well educated and had the leisure to write history. As economist Nathan Rosenberg and legal scholar L.E. Birdzell Jr. point out: “Part of the reason why we forget about the suffering throughout other eras is because we are attracted by the literature, poetry, romance and legends of the time. These magnificence and elegance only praise the excellent lives of a few people, but forget that the silent masses still live. In poverty. The times of suffering are thus mythologised, perhaps even remembered as a return to primitive times. No, they are not.”
Nurberg once quoted Braudel and painted a sketch of the difficult times. The definition of poverty at that time was simple: “If you can afford tomorrow’s bread and live another day, you are not poor.”
In wealthy Genoa, Italy, poor people sold themselves every winter to work as slaves in the galleys of merchant ships. In Paris, France, extremely poor people were locked together in pairs and forced to do the hard work of cleaning sewers. In England, the poor had to work in workhouses for relief, where they worked from dawn to dusk for almost no pay.
Some were instructed to crush the bones of dogs, horses and cattle for use as fertilizer, a job that was abolished in 1845 after an inspection of the workhouses revealed starving paupers fighting each other for a meal. Loot rotten bones to drain the marrow.
Another historian, Carlo Cipolla, once noted:
In pre-industrial Europe, buying a dress or the fabric for a dress was still a luxury that the average person could only afford a few times in their lifetime. One of the main tasks of hospital management is to ensure that the clothes of the deceased are not stolen or appropriated, but given to the rightful heirs. During plague epidemics, it was mandatory for a town’s government to confiscate the clothes of the dead and burn them: people would wait for others to die so they could strip off their clothes, but this often led to the spread of contagion.
How is wealth created? Questions about this question are often buried in modern political debates about how wealth should be distributed, as if the wealth to be distributed exists in the first place. Economists often refer to the “lump fallacy” or “physical fallacy”.
This fallacy holds that a certain amount of wealth has existed in the world since time began, like a gold mine, and that people have been fighting over how to distribute it ever since. One of the intellectual achievements of the Enlightenment was the recognition that wealth was created. Wealth is created primarily by knowledge and cooperation: people cooperate with each other and use their dexterity and labor to transform materials into useful forms. Although it seems radical, we can infer from this that humans can find ways to create more wealth.
Happiness
So are we happier? If we have any sense of gratitude, the answer should be yes. An American living in 2015 would live nine years longer, receive three more years of education, have an annual per capita household income of $33,000 more than his or her peers half a century ago, and would only need 1/ 3. Instead of spending 1/2 of your income on purchasing daily necessities, you can also enjoy 8 more hours of leisure time per week. He or she can use the extra leisure time to browse the web, listen to music on a smartphone, watch on-demand movies on an HDTV, video call friends and family, or go to a restaurant and eat Thai food instead of lunch meat croquettes.
But if public impressions are anything to go by, Americans today are not 1.5 times happier (if happiness is proportional to income) or 4/3 times (if happiness is proportional to education) than they were in the past. , or even 9/8 times (if happiness is directly proportional to life expectancy). People are the same as before. They like to sarcastically complain, complain, find fault, and complain. The life happiness index obtained by pollsters has not changed in the past few decades.
We can also see in pop culture that ungrateful attitudes are prevalent on the Internet, with comedian Louis CK in a single titled “Everything’s Amazing and Nobody’s Happy” Also mentioned in the talk show:
We live in a wonderful world today, but this wonderfulness has been wasted by a bunch of hypocritical idiots… Airplanes are the worst thing, just because someone gets off the plane and complains to you endlessly… They complained about things like: “That was the worst day of my life… We got on the plane and were seated, but they made us wait on the runway for 40 minutes. ” … Oh, 40 minutes. ,Then what? Did you ever fly like a bird afterwards? Have you ever magically soared above the clouds? Do you think it is a miracle that humans can fly? Not only did you fly into the sky, but you also landed smoothly on a few wheels and landed on the ground. You couldn’t even figure out how the air lifted this damn huge thing… You flew into the sky and still sat on it. On a chair. You are the god from Greek mythology! …people complaining that the plane is late? …Is flying too slow? It only takes 5 hours to fly from New York to California. People in the past would have spent 30 years! A few of you will die along the way. An arrow may fly from nowhere and pierce your neck. The other people traveling with you can only bury you on the spot and stick a stick on top of what you wore. hat, and then move on… If the Wright brothers knew so much about us today, they would definitely want to kick us (in the crotch).
In 1999, John Miller wrote to summarize his understanding of modernization at the time: ” People seemed to immediately become accustomed to the astonishing economic growth, and then began to look for trouble in the familiar way. This tendency was so obvious that people did not feel it. How can life be improved? ” This evaluation of modernization is not just because Americans have this ethos.
In 1973, economist Richard Easterlin discovered a paradox that has since been named after him. The Easterlin Paradox describes the phenomenon that, although within a country, wealthier conditions make people’s lives relatively happier, across countries, residents of rich countries are no happier than residents of poor countries. And if we compare historically, as a country becomes richer, the happiness of its citizens does not increase.
There are two theories in psychology that attempt to explain Easterlin’s Paradox. The “Hedonic Freadmill” theory holds that people gradually become accustomed to the wealth they possess, just as their eyes adapt and become accustomed to the alternation of light and dark, and then quickly eliminate the feelings caused by changes in wealth and return to a genetically related state. on the baseline. In addition, according to social comparison theory (also called reference group theory, status anxiety theory or relative deprivation theory, which we discussed in Chapter 9), people’s happiness is determined by their situation relative to their fellow citizens. So if a country as a whole becomes richer, no one will feel happier. Especially when the gap between rich and poor widens in the process of national development, residents will still feel less happy even if the country’s overall wealth increases.
In other words, people’s situation will never get better. In this case, we can’t help but wonder what the so-called progress in economics, medicine, and technology means. Many people think these are meaningless. They said that with the rise of individualism, materialism and consumerism, the smell of copper in society is strong, the good-neighborly and friendly social relations in traditional communities have been corroded, religious beliefs have collapsed, and the sense of meaning and mission in life is fading. We They have all become walking zombies with emptiness in their hearts. This is why we often see people in the news saying that depression, anxiety, loneliness and suicide are on the rise; and why Sweden, a country with a high welfare state, is famous for its high suicide rate.
What is happiness?
Thinkers have been thinking about what constitutes a good life since at least the Axial Age, and today happiness has become a major topic in sociology. Happiness is a research topic for economists rather than poets, essayists and philosophers. Some knowledgeable people have always been worried about this, and even felt deeply offended.
This is particularly true when it comes to answering the question “Does progress make people happier?” Evaluators have always questioned the measurability of happiness. In order to answer the previous question, we should first dispel their doubts.
Artists, philosophers and sociologists agree that happiness is not one-dimensional . People’s lives can improve in some aspects while deteriorating in others. Let’s distinguish some of the main aspects.
We can start to analyze from the objective level of happiness: whether those things that we think are truly valuable really get the attention they deserve from their owners. People think that the most valuable thing should be life itself, along with health, education, freedom and leisure and entertainment. These reflect the thinking behind Louis C.K.’s social criticism and are part of the basic human capabilities proposed by economists Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum.
With this objective definition, as long as a person lives long enough, is healthy and has a rich and colorful life, even if he is born with a pessimistic personality, or is depressed all day long, or is a hypocritical idiot and cannot feel these feelings of superiority, we It can also be said that his or her life is actually happy and beautiful. Although this definition is obviously paternalistic, it exists on the premise that life, health, and freedom are everything else, including the very act of thinking about the meaning of life. This characteristic determines their importance, which is the reason on the objective level.
Another reason is that the survey sample is biased by survivors who are unaware of their blessings. If we can expand the scope of the investigation and ask about the souls of children who died in infancy, the souls of mothers, and the people who died due to war, famine and plague, or we can go back through time and space and let them Make a choice before your death: continue to live in pre-modern society, or switch to living in modern society?
If so, we might be able to find worthy advocates for the objective superiority of modern society. Each of these dimensions of completion has been thematically presented in previous chapters, and we have also addressed the question of whether they improve over time.
Among these truly valuable things are freedom and autonomy : diverse choices to achieve a good life, known as positive freedom, and the absence of coercion that prevents people from making such choices, known as negative freedom. Amartya Sen speaks out for the value of freedom in the title of his book on the ultimate goal of national development: “Development in Freedom”.
Positive liberty corresponds to economists’ view of pragmatism, what people want and where they spend their property; negative liberty corresponds to political scientists’ view of democracy and human rights. As mentioned above, freedom (together with life and motivation) is the prerequisite for the existence of the very act of judging what is a “good life.”
Unless we feel that the life in front of us, good or bad, is a done deal, we will always judge the present from the perspective of “what would have happened if people in the past had done that”; and when we think about our future, we always feel that “what if” The land is far and wide, let me gallop.” For these reasons, the concept of “freedom” has been of unparalleled value since its inception.
Emotions and evaluations are certainly related, although not 100%: sufficient happiness makes for a better life, while a lack of negative emotions does not mean a better life. At this point, we have to mention the last aspect of a good life, a sense of meaning and mission. Meaning and purpose, coupled with happiness, become Aristotle’s ideal of “eudaemonia,” or “good mental outlook.”
Happiness doesn’t mean everything. We all do things that make us unhappy in the short term, but make us happy at the end of our lives, such as having a child, writing a book, or fighting for something worthwhile.
Although ordinary mortals cannot define what a truly meaningful life is, we might as well refer to the research results of psychologist Roy Baumeister and his colleagues, who have listed some things that can make a meaningful life possible. Things that make people feel their lives have meaning.
Participants in the study were asked to rate their level of happiness and meaning in their lives. The questionnaire included a long list of questions about personal thoughts, activities they participated in, and living conditions.
The survey results show that many of the things that make people happy in life also make their lives meaningful, such as forming bonds with others, living a fulfilling life and avoiding loneliness. But there are also some things that can make them happier while at the same time leaving them with a sense of lack of meaning in life.
People who live happy but empty lives often lack everything: they are healthy, financially well-off, and feel good about themselves most of the time. Those who pursue the meaning of life may not be lucky enough to endure these.
Those who pursue happiness in life live in front of them; while those who pursue the meaning of life reflect on the past and prepare for the future. People who live a happy and empty life are possessors and beneficiaries; people who pursue the meaning of life are givers and benefactors.
As parents, what you gain from your children is a sense of meaning, but not necessarily happiness. Time with friends brings happiness, and time with loved ones adds meaning to life .
Stress, anxiety, arguments, challenges, and struggles all diminish happiness in life but bring a sense of meaning.
It’s not that people who pursue the meaning of life have masochistic tendencies and insist on making themselves unhappy, but because they have ambitions: “But in the end, people are not as good as God.” In the end, meaning lies in self-expression rather than self-satisfaction: Life The point is to define ourselves with actions and build our reputation at the same time.
We can think of happiness as the product of an ancient biofeedback system that tracks our pursuit of health and well-being in our natural environment. Typically, we feel happier when we are healthier, more comfortable, safer, more prosperous, socially connected, and loved. The function of happiness is to guide us to pursue things related to happiness: when we feel unhappy, we will find ways to obtain resources that can improve our situation; and when we feel happy, we will become content with the status quo.
In contrast, thinking about the meaning of life is an area of conscious activity unique to humans as a social, intelligent, and talkative species. The pursuit of meaning is a novel life goal, and it is expensive. Its starting point is in the distant past and its end point is in the unseen future. Its scope of influence far exceeds one’s social circle. It needs to be recognized by our fellow citizens, which depends on whether we can convince others of its value. , it also depends on one’s long-term reputation, benevolence, and ability.
Some people hope that the trend of people becoming happier will last forever, but the role of happiness in human psychology is not omnipotent, and progress cannot bring unlimited happiness. However, a lot of unhappiness can be eliminated, and no matter how far people go in the pursuit of meaning in life, there will be no limit to the reduction of unhappiness.