Non-Equilibrium Thermodynamics / Dissipative Structures

Schrodinger's What Is Life? (1944) asked how an organism resists decay toward equilibrium, and answered that it feeds on negative entropy, extracting order from its surroundings and exporting disorder. He later said free energy would have been the honest term.

Prigogine generalised it as DISSIPATIVE STRUCTURES: any system far from equilibrium that maintains structure by throughput. A candle flame does it. A convection cell does it. Life does it for four billion years and gets better at it.

WHY THIS MATTERS TO THE MEMBRANE ARGUMENT: the boundary is where the accounting happens. The gradient exists only across a wall. No membrane, no inside to keep ordered, no outside to dump into. Schrodinger's organism cannot be described without one, and he never made the wall the subject. This is the same gap found in Beer's cybernetics and in Hofstadter's formalism, now in a third field.

Also relevant: dissipative structures are NOT rare. Life is anomalous in DEGREE, not in KIND. That is the version of the anomaly claim that survives contact with physics.

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