Orac, I may be a bit confused in some places but one thing I think you said is that entropy is different in QM than it is in classical physics. Then you said that for this reason you have to use QM entropy rather than classical entropy when discussing life. Now you have given us a link to a posting by Lubos Motl. I checked that link and read through his whole post. At one point in the post he said:
Also, the specific properties of quantum mechanics - such as interference and the ability to violate Bell's inequalities via entanglement - become irrelevant in statistical physics because the very goal of statistical physics is to consider the effect of having very many states that differ from each other in details and that decohere: whenever you have such large ensembles of states, the classical reasoning is becoming a good approximation. Decoherence guarantees that interference disappears. Consequently, the overall logic of quantum statistical physics is the same as it was in classical statistical physics.
Now here Motl seems to be to be saying that for larger systems, such as life, there is no visible difference between classic and QM entropy.
And you also said, based on your reading of the link to Baez:
- Organisms will always get more and more complex or else they run out of "things to learn" and come into quantum equilibrium.
Why would organisms always get more and more complex? It doesn't seem to me that they have to get more complex, they can just change. After all, they just have to know about their current environment, not what it was earlier. If they can handle the current environment they don't need to know how to handle the previous one, so they can forget it. Also the quote you give says they come into evolutionary equilibrium, not quantum equilibrium. I don't see that those are the same things at all.
Bill Gill
