The Law of Maximum Entrnopy Production

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produce as much order as it can. Autocatakinetic systems are self-amplifying sinks that by pulling potentials or resources into their own self-production extend the space-time dimensions and thus the dissipative surfaces of the fields (system plus environment) from which they emerge and thereby increase the dissipative rate.

Conclusion

The postulates of incommensurability built into the foundations of modern science and reinforced by the view that the second law of thermodynamics was a law of disorder have produced what Lakatos (1970) has called a "degenerative problem shift". A research program, paradigm or world view becomes degenerative when its core postulates are, in balance, more negative than positive with respect to an expanded understanding of the natural world. The postulates of incommensurability have left the most fundamental aspects of biology and psychology, in particular the active, end-directed nature of living things and their relation to their environments, at the largest terrestrial scale the self-organizing planetary

system as a whole, unexplained, and unapproachable.
Ecological psychologists (e.g., Gibson, 1979/1986), arguing that living things and their environments must be seen as single systems have historically rejected the postulates of incommensurability, and instead have adopted living thing-environment mutuality or reciprocity as a basic postulate. The law of entropy production maximization when coupled with the balance equation of the second law and the general process of autocatakinesis shows how this postulate can be directly derived. New insights into the relation between thermodynamics and evolutionary theory thus provide a rich new context for understanding the active, end-directedness of living things, for grounding biology, and a fortiori psychology in a commensurable context of universal law. Rather than being infinitely improbable "debt payers" struggling against the laws of physics in a "dead" world collapsing to equilibrium and disorder, living things and their active, end directed striving or intentional dynamics can now be seen as productions of an active order producing world following directly from natural law.

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