The Second Law of Thermodynamics, Consciousness, and Public Restrooms.

Earlier today, I went to a public restroom at my public university, and I had this distinct thought: "Why do we do this? How did we develop the restroom?"

I had a mini-existential crisis on this thought; it is something that I don't consider often and don't really think about. If one thinks about it, it would be far more convenient (from an immediate sense) if humanity didn't worry about where we went to urinate and defecate and just did it as animals do: on a random piece of ground outside. I'm certain that the Earth wouldn't mind more legitimate fertilizer.

As I thought on this, it reminded me of a social phenomenon that is currently happening in cyberspace.

That's right: "Twitch Plays Pokémon."

In this "social experiment" (as some have called it), tens of thousands of Pokémon players from around the world are trying to lead poor Red (and, in the newest incarnation, a misguided boy named [by the community] AJ) through the entirety of Pokémon Red (Crystal in the newest version) by using crowdsourced commands. It seems like a new iteration of the idea of "if you put enough monkeys in a room, given infinite time, they will write the works of Shakespeare."

Except, it's not.

I've been considering this, along with the public restroom thought I mentioned earlier, and realized that Twitch Plays Pokémon has totally different parameters than if, per se, I closed my eyes and pressed randomly-generated commands given through a computer program. Or, if, to make the story more interesting, I had monkeys randomly choosing between the options of "Right", "Left", "Up", "Down", "A", "B", and "START". I do not believe that in my latter thought-experiment I would ever succeed at beating Pokémon.

There is something about the power of Consciousness that makes Twitch Plays Pokémon fascinating. The game relies on a setting called "Anarchy," in which all of the commands from the tens of thousands of people playing are inputted as they are received... But the success of the game is actually not dependent upon real Anarchy.

The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that, naturally, energy goes from places of higher concentration to places of lower concentration. This governs the movement of light, heat, and even general principles of motion and gravity. Entropy is the measure of disorder in thermodynamics -- and it seems that the entire world is governed on the principle of the universe going from more order to less order. Chemical processes favor those which have a less energized (less unstable) state. For you non-science folks: the universe is spreading out like butter.

Consciousness throws a seemingly-ontological wrench into the system of entropy. Given the basics of the laws of thermodynamics, laws of probability, or the laws of "many monkeys" (as it were), and Pokémon Red could never be defeated by a series of random inputs. Or, if it could, it would take far longer than the 16-day feat that the Internet just churned out (which included, might I add, the capture of Zapdos, an extremely powerful (and revered?) Pidgeot, the resurrection of Omanyte and its subsequent evolution to Omastar, and the defeat of a Dragonite by "All-Terrain Venomoth" in a fundamentally-surprising way).

But a "mindless" mass of individually-conscious beings have done something amazingly surprising: they defeated Pokémon Red in 16 days.

What does this have to do with public restrooms? I find it philosophically to be the same subject. If we were to follow the "normal" process of entropy and the laws of thermodynamics, I do believe that we would live in  a world where everyone pooped outside. Why? Because public restrooms is a higher form of organizing our excrement. Just like how libraries are a higher form of organizing information, and machines are higher forms of organizing simple mechanics, the very concept of a public restroom is an example of a "mindless" mass of individually-conscious beings doing something uniformly that is quite... impressive.

There are a lot of reasons for having public restrooms -- particularly from a cleanliness, hygienic perspective. But the reality that this idea was not an individually-developed idea, but, rather, a cultural/group/"crowdsourced" idea profoundly shows the discrepancy between Human Consciousness and the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Our ontological essence directly refutes the core operation of the physical universe.

I like that.

I say all this to make some sort of fundamental claim about the Universe and about Creation. That is, that God has created a universe which naturally and silently progresses towards higher entropy, but the very action of Creation itself disrupts that entropy and counters it. We see this in Genesis 1 when He creates the universe and then immediately gets on to organizing it. I've said this before, and I want to highlight this fundamental mechanism: God's act of Creation not only goes contrary to laws of physics which He has put in place, but He has also given to humans the power to do likewise. Consciousness could thus be defined as "that divinely-imbued power inherent in Man which allows him to create spaces of higher organization and less entropy, contrary to the Second Law of Thermodynamics itself."

And whereas I don't think anyone would go as far and make the claim that Twitch Plays Pokémon is a brilliant example of humanity's powers of higher organization, it is clearly a refutation to the belief that random occurrence could produce victory in the game of Pokémon. The mindless mass is not mindless, but Conscious, and, even, Cooperating. “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them." (Genesis 11:6) -- and that is how they can win Pokémon. Likewise, this is why we have public restrooms: not because an individual decided as such, but because Conscious beings naturally have the power to move towards places of higher organization.