>>12104576>Then they must be perpetually be unstableI think I've found the source of disagreement.
I'm not using "stable" in a "thermodynamic" sense, I'm using it in a "attracting fixed point" sense.
What I am calling stable is steady states - local minima.
What you seem to be calling stable is thermodynamic equilibrium - global minimum.
I already addressed this, hence why I said that on long timescales, life, organizations, etc may become physically impossible, due to heat death, etc.
My point is that so long as life does exist, it cannot be doing so on an energy deficit, and this creates an evolutionary "restoring force" that limits what kind of evolution is possible.
There will never be an absence of the abstract "profit motive", because these configurations are repelling fixed points of the evolutionary dynamics.
If the people engaging in subsistence weren't getting return on their investment, subsistence wouldn't be viable.
Subsistence still has profit driven dynamics, it just doesn't have dynamics driven by "relative competition" for lack of a better term, i.e. how much you need isn't relative to how much others have, which seems to have become synonymous with "profit" in modern English.
