Cultural Naturalism

Abstract

Culture can be viewed as the means by which a society can live in its surroundings by acquiring and consuming free energy. This naturalistic notion assumes that everything can be valued in terms of energy, hence also social changes can be described as natural processes that are influenced by the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. This universal law, when formulated as an equation of motion, reveals that societies emerge, evolve and eventually extinguish after tapping, exploiting and finally depleting their resources, which we can say are ultimately valued in energetic terms. The analysis reveals that trajectories of societies are, however, inherently non-integrable, i.e., unpredictable in detail because free energy as the driving force, being finite, is inseparable from the flows of energy. Nonetheless, the universal tendency to diminish energy differences within a system and with respect to its surroundings in the least possible time gives rise to highly economical but seemingly immaterial means of energy transduction that associate with cultural codes, habits, traditions, taboos and values. Moreover, cultural naturalism clarifies that identities develop and mature in interactions, and that class structure results from the quest for maximum entropy partition. While social changes in complex societies are inherently intractable, the profound principle allows us to recognize universal tendencies in diverse cultural characteristics, and to rationalize prospects for the future. OPEN ACCESSEntropy 2010, 12 1326

Threads of Time

“…Life emerged and flourished as functional structures [11], therefore, without demarcation from its surroundings [63]. Selection naturally operates in like manner, guided by the Second Law, on economic and cultural evolutions [64,65].…”

Fokker-Planck Equation and Thermodynamic System Analysis

“…According to [15,16], cells' behavior could be seen as the consequence of the interplay and dynamic balance between pairs of opposite elements, that are in the present approach the cell system and its environment. In [23][24][25][26] it has been pointed out that the two principles, maximum of entropy generation and least action, can be seen as the same fundamental laws of nature. The natural behavior of the open systems could be thought as the decrease of free energy in the least time (minimum).…”

“…The least time can be evaluated by the entropy generation theorem. Using the entropy generation is possible to analyze the irreversibility in real systems overcoming most of the difficulties rising with the entropy production approach as pointed out by [23,24]. The link between the entropy generation and the Fokker-Planck equation leads to a statistical…”

The Character of Consciousness

“…Free will equates with free energy in one's disposal (Annila and Salthe, 2010b). One may execute at most as much as one has free energy in command.…”

“…Specifically, when we claim that a society is consciousness too, we do not exactly mean Durkheim's collective conscience of beliefs and sentiments among members of a society (Durkheim, 1893) but refer to the natural processes that integrate the society for the coherent free energy consumption. These integrated actions, i.e., culture as a whole (Annila and Salthe, 2010b), can be regarded as meaningful or responsible, i.e., conscious. It is not about analogy between a consciousness society and a consciousness individual, it is about equality because the theory describes both systems exactly the same way.…”