To understand ourselves as primarily here to produce waste is to face the unsettling fact that our bodies and systems are throughput machines. What we consume is less important than the transformation that occurs in the middle, where emergent rules of metabolism, language, and culture operate. Output is not accidental but constitutive: waste is not just the shadow of order, it is the condition for order’s persistence. The fragility of human self-image lies here, in the discomfort that identity is bound not to purity or progress but to decay, residue, and the necessary expulsion that makes coherence possible at all.
There is a solid physical principle here: order can only be maintained by borrowing against the disorder we generate, and we always generate more disorder than order. This imbalance is not collapse but the essence of a metastable system, where decay and dissolution at one scale sustain reproduction at another. What feels unbearable—aging, sickness, poverty, death°°—is not evidence of failure but the terrain of continuation. Physically, we are bridges: producing bacteria, exhaling carbon dioxide, seeding processes beyond ourselves. The breakdown is not the end; it is the generative transfer by which life propagates.
This dynamic is manifold: coherence in one region always requires incoherence elsewhere. The delta between order and disorder, between signal and noise, is not a flaw but the binding agent of the system itself. To name this plainly—that life is organized waste-production—is to disturb delicate myths of purpose. Yet this is the cobordism: surfaces join across absence, continuity is stitched by discontinuity, and the very waste we deny is the bridge by which systems persist.
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°° Buddhist psychological insights apply.
Daedelus Kite 
One reply on “Entropic Deferral: Lossy Signals”
● Entropic Deferral refers to how meaning, structure, or coherence in a system is postponed by dispersing disorder forward in time or across space. Instead of collapse occurring immediately, the system delays it by offloading entropy into its surroundings or into future states. This is how living systems, economies, and technologies sustain themselves: they defer breakdown by exporting waste, inefficiency, and disorder elsewhere.
● Lossy Signals describe the medium of this deferral. Information is never transmitted intact; it sheds redundancy, precision, and context as it moves. This “lossiness” is not just degradation but the very way transmission persists, since absolute fidelity is impossible. The signal survives precisely because it can tolerate error, approximation, and noise.
● Together, entropic deferral and lossy signals describe a fundamental logic: persistence requires loss, and continuity is purchased at the price of inevitable dissipation.
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