Objections & Responses

This is the classic Platonic objection. OCE's answer is that knowledge does not require eternal objects, just sufficient temporal regularities. A star does not need to be eternal to be studied; all it takes is for its main sequence phase to last long enough to be modeled. Scientific "truth" is operative consistency with metastable processes, not adherence to an immutable essence.

No. Recognizing that forms are transitory does not mean that "anything goes" or that nothing matters. On the contrary, instability is presented as a creative condition (without supernovae, there would be no carbon for life). Ethically, this imposes a greater responsibility: as there are no eternal natural laws dictating morality, we are the ones who must continually reinscribe the norms of justice to respond to new configurations of reality.

This is a simplistic reading of the Second Law in closed systems. The text argues, with support from Prigogine, that in open systems (such as the Earth or a cell), the flow of energy allows instability to generate local order (dissipative structures). Global disorder increases, but local complexity flourishes precisely porque the system is far from equilibrium.