“… it’s less clear to me if you can successfully add in a new catalyst or new element to reverse the entropy and get things going again. Can you get past all of the by product (good and bad) of the initial reaction and resulting entropy.”

Have you come across Maturana’s autopoeisis? It’s a lot like what de Chardin had to say about how things strive upwards. (I’ve never found a good way of expressing that stuff … I really don’t want to get into stuff like teleology, though I’m fond of Buckminster Fuller’s “tensegrity”. Is why the new domain I started is ProTension, just grappling with this.)

The best I’ve read is from a venerable old Sanskritist / dharma translator by the name of Herbert Guenther. I had the chance to talk to him over supper one evening at a monastery; I got into how “dynamically balanced systems restore themselves after passing through a chaotic phase by way of feed-back/feed-forward” and he, without missing a beat, offered that they “digest entropy”. Yaa, like that!

cheers

p.s. this is the first time in my life I ever register on another individual’s WP … this feels like an illicit thrill! *grin*
p.s.2 sure do wish WP offered preview