Tonight, a friend asked me, “What pervades everything?” I thought about it, and I don’t know. In the past, I have thought about what goes through everything. I gave that earlier question the answer “information”. Although one can say it isn’t information, because information is not necessarily all pervasive — but then maybe it is. Information triggers the creation of more information. The movement is from information to information. Is there a moment where there is no pure information in the system and it is a heterogeneous mixture of information and something else? That something else can be described in terms of information and this is what introduces the creation of information. I do not believe that information only changes from one form to another. The amount of information continuously increases — this is entropy. Then, of course, there is a relationship between the measure of entropy and work. Both are time dependant and increase with time. Work is essentially (simplification!) the energy used summed over time. The actual energy in the system remains the same. Entropy measures the increase in information content, but if, by analogy, there is something like energy — say a state — then states are conserved. States merely transform from one configuration to another based on the information content. Entropy increases as states change from one to another — just like work increases as energy changes from one form to another.
Basically, the act of being permeates everything. However, this is not what I’m going to write about.
I was also thinking about our past — the pioneer days, the colonization of America, the rise and fall of empires, the conquest of the new, and the excitement of establishing things. Where have these days gone? I know that we have a society that is adverse to violence. It would seem as though our conception of pioneering includes plight and plunder, but does it have to be that way? If there were no struggle in action movies, they wouldn’t be quite as exciting. I’m sure this has to do with the way we have evolved over time. It doesn’t seem as though we have entirely domesticated ourselves, and it might take an excruciatingly long time to do so. Still, when will the next county be chartered in a state? Will there be a 51st state? The only real amazing thing one can do these days is charter a city or corporation.
Of course there are those modern day stories of people who have started their own countries. Countries are things that seem to always change, they are destroyed, they are conquered, or they just dissolve. In most cases there is some sort of struggle or war. It seems as though modern civilization (in first world countries) has either restricted people from, or taught most people not to fight against the government. There are probably hundreds of reasons for this. A few are: People don’t always know much about their government. People are indoctrinated that their government is the best government and allows them more freedom than the other countries’ governments. People don’t to do things that they used too. People have become complacent and apathetic toward anything save what they are interested in (which often times doesn’t include anything besides the normal).
Americans are losing their fighting spirit that gained their freedoms (which are slowly being taken away, in my humble opinion). I don’t mean this in the “we should go conquer everyone” sense, but in the sense of having fought for something and wanting to guard it.
