Nietzsche is dead.
The relationship between the first Noble Truth and the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
The First Noble Truth of Buddhism is “existence is suffering.” Like many Great Truths, it both requires explanation and it doesn’t. It points to a universal human experience: persistent dissatisfaction. If you’re alive, things will suck. That’s what existence is.
The Second Law of Thermodynamics asserts that entropy always increases. That is, things move in one direction, and in one direction only: towards increasing entropy. That’s what time is.
Once gas molecules in a box crammed all on one side of it have a chance to move around (increasing entropy, or put another way, as “time passes”), they won’t ever return to the highly organized way they were beforehand. No matter how much “time passes,” otherwise undisturbed, the gas molecules that were once crammed on one side of the box will move to, and then stay at equilibrium, their maximum state of entropy.
The Buddhist concept of suffering is what it “feels” like to witness the quantum mechanics concept of increasing entropy.
Whatchu talkin’ ‘bout, Willis?
Let’s say you’re a two hundred and something year old democratic republic. There have been growing pains, crises of Faith, civil wars, moral failures, and many celebrations over that time. Then, your system produces Trump. What the fuck happened?
Entropy increased. The US had concentrated a huge amount of organizational effort into sustenance of what became a frozen system of laws and cultural norms. We were willing to concede that the world will change, but by God, the constitution has to remain the same! Our values must remain enshrined in that document always and forever because….well, it is written!
Folks, the Federalist Papers were the 18th century equivalent of political blog posts. Now we’ve practically adopted them as scripture. In two hundred years will it be let us read now from The Book of Maddow?
Why does this kind of nonsense happen? Because we want this forever-existing unchanging thing. If it is old, it must be right. We hate the increase of entropy, so we bend over backwards to resist it.
I’ve got news for you babe, that’s against Schrodinger’s Law.
Reality doesn’t care what you think.
If things are always becoming more disorganized, how can anything new be created? Entanglement. That is, if you are organizing things in one locality, things are being disorganized elsewhere.
Let’s say you’re playing checkers with a person of incontinent character. They get angry about the game and flip the board on to the floor, scattering checkers everywhere. Entropy has increased.
You, being patient and having a good memory, pick up the board, stack all the pieces where they were, and prepare to resume the game. Has not entropy DECREASED?
No, it hasn’t. You are part of a larger system than your game of checkers. In order to reorganize the game to be able to resume play, you had to expend energy. That energy arose because of the consumption of fuel. The fuel was once mass, now it is energy, and it’s elemental particles are seeking a new equilibrium after existing as fuel, their entropy has increased. Voila’.
You could whip out your phone as you resume play and snap a pic of the board. You would then have a fairly reliable representation of the past. That is, you can say, and believe for certain, that at one time in the past the board looked like this.
You cannot possess, and you never will, a similarly reliable representation of the future. You cannot produce something and say for certain that this is what is going to happen in the future, for example, on January 21, 2029.
Why? Because between now and the future, entropy is going to increase and the world now will be closer to equilibrium than it is now. It will be a different place, one that we can’t map for certain now.
Contrast that with what we know about, oh, January 6th, 2021. We can say for certain what the world was like on that day in the past. Why can we do that for the past but not for the future?
Because entropy was lower in the past. That’s what makes it the past. More organized systems are easier to understand. They’re organized. If you put cream in your coffee, at one time you had 8 oz of coffee and 0.5 oz of cream. They were easy to measure, there was no controversy about any of that. That’s what you had. If you needed to prove it, it would be a simple task with many methods for proof.
Once you mix that cream in your coffee, you can only claim that it is made of exactly 8 oz of coffee and 1/2 oz of cream. You can make a good claim, a rational claim, but there’s no way to unmix the coffee so that someone else could verify your claim. Why? Entropy has increased.
If you needed, for some farcical reason, to PROVE that you mixed exactly 8 oz of coffee with exactly 0.5 oz of cream, you’d be out of luck. Even if you performed gas spectrometry on your coffee and precisely measured all of it’s component parts, it would be easy to use stronger or weaker coffee, or milk instead of cream, and achieve an identical solution from different components.
That’s dissatisfying, isn’t it?
Welcome to what Buddhism describes as suffering. Why did it happen? Entropy increased as the diary dispersed itself in your coffee. It is a new world now in the cup of joe.
Yet, you don’t spend a lot of time struggling with the fact that coffee can’t be un-mixed, do you? No, you don’t, because you have accepted that there’s nothing you can do about the cream mixing with the coffee once it has happened.
Buddhism, particularly the Diamond Sutra, encourages the same view of existence. Look, the cream mixes in. Similarly, we die and get old. We have to say goodbye at some point to everyone and everything we ever love. Nothing stays the same.
Things are not always so. Period. That sucks.
The suckage is suffering as Buddhism describes it, and the second law of thermodynamics is why it exists.
We can’t unmix the coffee.