In light of a discussion Tim and I have been having via email, I’ve found myself reflecting on my core obsessions. What is that thing or those things that haunt me at the core of thought, those issues that always return, those things that I can never quite get out of my head? This question might appear easy to answer. I’m obsessed with the nature of substance. I’m obsessed with local manifestation and virtual proper being. I’m obsessed with dynamisms. I’m obsessed with questions of why people treat each other in such horrific and cruel ways and with questions of why we tolerate so many forms of brutal oppression. While I’m certainly obsessed with all of these things, they also feel like embroidery on the edge of a pillow surrounding a deeper and more fundamental obsession. Reflecting on a recent exchange between us, Tim asks
I’m still inclined to ask, just out of curiosity, if you feel an anxiety when you have to “define your terms,” since I think that is the root anxiety I’m dealing with.
Sometimes a question, while seeming to be unrelated, can have the effect of bringing things into relief that were before too close to be seen. Despite appearances to the contrary, when asked to “define my term” or pin my positions down I do experience a sudden overwhelming flood of anxiety. I don’t think this is because I can’t do so. Clearly I can. Rather, I think I have this reaction because I don’t experience my writing and thought in this way. I don’t experience my work as a fixed and stable set of positions and terms, but as a sort of territory that I’m wandering across with a great deal of uncertainty and as a terrain that’s ever shifting and undergoing modification. I feel as if I’m perpetually forgetting things, as if things are constantly shifting and slipping away, and as if everything is constantly on the verge of flying apart or exploding. Yet as harrowing and as frustrating as this might be– somewhere Deleuze and Guattari remark that there is nothing more distressing than thoughts that slip away or fall apart –I also experience this precarious nature of the territory as a source of creativity that provides me with the energy and desire to keep writing and thinking. If I sometimes become overwhelmed by anxiety when being asked to pin things down, then this is because I experience such fixity as death. As Wayne of Wayne’s World says “to define me is to negate me!” This would, of course, entail that to define oneself is to commit suicide (in this regard, I really detest movement labels like “object-oriented ontology” or “onticology”; they reek of the obituaries).
Yet, in the spirit of committing suicide, Tim’s question leads me to think that if there is one persistent theme that is at the heart of everything that obsesses me, I would say that theme is entropy. This already says too much, however, because I find that the thought of entropy is always slipping away from me. Rather, I would say that the thought of entropy elusively borders everything I obsess over and try to think about it. It is thus not substances, local manifestations, dynamisms, machines, regimes of attraction, systems, processes, etc., that absorb me. Rather, all of these things are ways of trying to think entropy, the significance of entropy, the reality of entropy, and the promise of entropy.
read on!
People have the wrong idea about entropy. They hear the term “entropy” and they immediately think “heat death”. While this is not wrong, it doesn’t say nearly enough for entropy is so much more than mere heat death. Entropy is the measure of order in any system. In this regard, to take a rough and ready criterion, the more probable it is that a particular element is located anywhere in a system the more entropy that system embodies. By contrast, the more improbable the location of an element in a system, the less entropic that system is. Thus, systems characterized by high entropy are highly chaotic or disordered, while systems characterized by low entropy are highly ordered. Finally, those systems that maintain the improbability of the location of their elements over time are referred to as “negentropic”. “Negentropy” is a sort of portmanteau word combining “negation” and “entropy”, signifying “the negation of entropy”. In other words, negentropic systems like my body or a corporation are systems that maintain their order.
All of this is very abstract, so some examples might help. A crowd is a highly entropic system. The reason that crowds are highly entropic systems is not that they have suffered “heat death”, but because among the elements that compose the crowd (people), there is an equal probability that any particular person can be found in any place within the crowd. In this respect, crowds are like gaseous clouds. Think of it this way. If we had all the members of the crowd in a bag like different colored marbles, when we reached into the bag and grabbed a person there would be no way of measuring the probability of which person we picked out. There would be an equal probability of pulling out a man or woman, a poor person or a wealthy person, a religious person or an atheist, a white person or a black person, etc. A crowd is a highly disordered aggregate.
By contrast, while my college might superficially resemble a crowd, it is ordered in a very different way. In a college the elements that compose the college– the president, deans, secretaries, custodians, professors, students, etc. –are characterized by improbability. It is improbable that one person should retain the fixed identity of being the president, another of being a professor, another of being a student, and so on. Yet they do. As a consequence, colleges are characterized by a high degree of negentropy or are highly ordered across time. It’s not just that these systems have a low degree of entropy, but that they’re highly negentropic. A gas pumped into a glass box is initially characterized by a low degree of entropy because the gas particles are improbably located in one corner of the box. Yet as these gas particles are distributed throughout the entire glass box the the system evolves to a state of high entropy. It is for this reason that gas clouds in their initially stages are not negentropic. The difference between a low entropy system and a negentropic system is that the latter somehow maintains its order across time.
For me, substances, entities, or objects are negentropic systems. An object is a highly ordered system. Or, amounting to the same thing, an object is a highly improbable being. I am deeply interested in questions of how there’s any order in the world at all and of the sort of work required by negentropic systems to stave off entropy. How do they do it? Why do improbabilities (highly ordered objects) persist? And if my hypothesis that objects are negentropic systems, it also follows that objects are not stupid clods that just sit there. Rather, objects must be a work, an activity, a process. A brute, motionless clod that sits there would be the exact opposite of negentropy, for entropy is the evaporation of all work, its disappearance, or the descent into equaprobability. Work is the maintenance and continuation of improbability; the unlikely arrangement of parts in a particular order.
Yet what fascinates me here is not order or negentropy simpliciter, but the fact that coiled within order there is always entropy or disorder. Objects or negentropic systems are never so successful that they stave off all entropy. Rather, they are in a perpetual state of disintegration or collapse into equaprobability. We should avoid the temptation to code the terms “entropy” and “negentropy”, “chaos” and “order”, on to the terms “bad” and “good”. If I would like to know about the work negentropic systems perform to maintain improbability or order, then this is because there are a number of negentropic systems I would like to see destroyed. Such systems would include systems like global capitalism, corporations, segregated communities, and so on. All of these systems are characterized by a high degree of improbability in how bodies are organized, coded, or partitioned. Perhaps if we knew something of the work these systems perform to sort and segregate persons in this way we could devise ways to introduce entropy into these systems so as to destroy them.
Likewise, we shouldn’t assume that “entropy” signifies “bad”. A moment ago I mentioned the promise of entropy. This is counter-intuitive for those who immediately assumes that entropy signifies “heat death”. “How could one possibly think that heat death is a good thing?” However, while heat death is radical entropy, entropy is the same as heat death. A little bit of equaprobability within a negentropic system is the promise of revolution, of change, of escape from despotic systems or objects, but is also a source of creativity, invention, and novelty within negentropic systems. Language has a high co-efficient of both negentropy and entropy within it. It is both improbable that sounds should be organized in the way they are in a language and language is subject to a great deal of equaprobability in the process of interpretation. I say one thing to another person. That person takes what I said in a completely unexpected way, finding resonances and connotations in my words that I did not notice or intend. Far from being the ruin of communication, this appearance of equaprobability of interpretation, this eruption of polysemy, becomes both an engine that maintains the relation between myself and the other person (we must communicate further to clarify our meanings) and that leads to the creative dimension of communication (the “misinterpretation” opens up new associations and connections of meaning that leads us to co-produce something neither of us anticipated, nor could have anticipated). There is a promise to entropy.
In many respects, the role that entropy plays in my thought places me close to the metaphysical, political, and ethical conclusions of Ray Brassier. In Nihil Unbound, Brassier argues that the ultimate truth of existence is extinction. In making this claim, he’s not simply pointing out that we all die, but is claiming that at some point the human species will become extinct and that the universe itself will undergo heat death.
While I am unsure whether or not the universe will eventually suffer heat death– I tend to side with Deleuze’s arguments about certain illusions of absolute entropy as presented in Difference and Repetition –I do think Brassier’s observations hold important ethical import as a thought experiment. Brassier argues that the thought of radical extinction carries with it an enlightenment. What might this enlightenment be? Why might this horrific thought of erasure, extinction, be enlightening and ethically invigorating? I think this question can be answered by situating Brassier’s thesis in the context of classical materialisms such as we find in Democritus, Epicurus, Lucretius, and Marx. Today a student came to my office after reading Book I of Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura wondering why, when he begins the book with remarks about ethics and how to attain happiness, he spends the rest of his time discussing scientific matters such as atoms?
The answer to this question is that for Lucretius questions of the nature of physical reality are not distinct from questions of ethics. The two are intertwined. I must know the nature of physical reality to answer the question of how best to live, how best to organize society, what to aim for, what to hope for, etc. Lurking in the background of all materialist thought is the hunch that one of the central sources of human suffering is, on the one hand, the “two world hypothesis”, and, on the other hand, what might be called “messianism” and salvation. The two world hypothesis is the thesis that being is divided between two worlds, the domain of the corrupt world of becoming and change and the afterlife. If this is a source of suffering, then it is because it teaches us that our bodies don’t matter, that the bodies of others don’t matter, that we needn’t attend to the earth, etc., because all of these things are temporary and illusory compared to the world of afterlife. If messianism is a source of human suffering and cruelty, then this is because it teaches us that our present circumstances and world are of no miracle compared to the apocalypse or that point of turning where salvation will finally take place and we’ll be rescued. As a consequence, we reason that all our actions should be directed at this end, not at the world and persons about us.
If we situate Brassier’s radical nihilism in this context, we can see why it is a sort of enlightenment. The truth of extinction is not the gloomy thought that all is pointless because everything is going to be destroyed anyway. Rather, the thought experiment of radical extinction hopefully accomplishes three aims. Insofar as the truth of every person’s life is death (i.e., there’s no afterlife), we should not direct ourselves to an afterlife, but rather should devote ourselves to this life. How can we live in relation to ourselves, to others, and to the earth in order to best live this brief spark that we possess? How should society be transformed and organized to maximize this existence? Second, the truth of extinction with respect to the existence of the human species has the effect of decentering us. We can imagine a world where we are absent. As a consequence, we are not at the center of existence. We are one being– certainly important to ourselves –among others, and we are a being like the others destined to pass away. This discovery encourages us to both respect other beings, but also to recognize the fragility of ourselves and the world we rely on and therefore attend to the preservation of that world. Finally, the extinction of the universe cures us of messianism. There is no apocalypse, no final revelation of the truth, no final salvation, just this world. As such, we should squarely direct ourselves at this world and the work required to maintain this world, not at a world to come or an afterlife.
But I’ve wandered far here from my discussion with Tim. Although Tim and I might speak very different vocabularies, on the theme of entropy I think the two of us are very close together. Tim likes to emphasize the density of language, its opacity, its thickness, its polysemy, and the manner in which it fails to pin things down or master what it seeks to discuss. In my dialect, this is a statement about the presence of entropy at the heart of discourse, communication, theory, and language. I find nothing to object to here as language is subject to entropy like anything else. I only insist that this play of chaos and order is at work in all things, including language, including my own practice of thought.
Larval Subjects . 
March 6, 2012 at 12:51 am
Levi, have you looked into simulated annealing as a way of thinking about change?
I doesn’t speak exactly to your problematic of entropy, but you might want to add it to your toolset.
March 6, 2012 at 1:16 am
Reblogged this on * secret amazon and commented:
I LOVE THIS POST
March 6, 2012 at 1:48 am
Really enjoyable post, Levi. One of the things about academic life that can be quite alienating at times is the length to which most of us go to conceal the inevitable anxieties that form around our work and ideas. The problem is so ubiquitous that a simple acknowledgment of such anxieties can function as an important type of micro-political intervention-through-example. But it struck me that there was a bit more than just that going on in the above, in that the particular type of anxieties you described–the loss and/or disintegration of ideas; the threat of things flying apart and exploding–is itself a type of entropy. So, in explaining that this source of anxiety is also a source of creativity for you, you also put forth an anticipatory example of what you talk about later in the post–i.e. the ways in which entropy can spur the creative reorganization of complex systems.
I also liked your argument that Brassier’s conclusions comprise a sort of thought experiment that explores the implications of the scientific theory that the world will someday die. It strikes me that one way of characterizing the differences between onticology and OOP may be to see them as alternate thought experiments carried out beneath the same intellectual umbrella (i.e. object-oriented substance theory, broadly conceived). Onticology explores the implications of the idea that the existence of temporally persistent ordered beings must be accounted for by processes unfolding on the material and spatio-temporal level of reality; whereas the latter explores the implications of the possibility that this level alone is incapable of accounting for the existence of consistent individuals and forms. Since speculation is always speculative, both of these projects strike me as worthwhile compliments to each other, and I am glad that there are people pursuing each.
March 6, 2012 at 2:07 am
Also, speaking of Brassier–wondering if you’ve heard of the relatively recent scientific theory of “The Big Bounce”? It supposedly lends fresh quantum/ mathematical support to the old notion that the cosmos follows a cycle of inflationary and deflationary processes, rather than being the result of a unique original explosion leading to endless inflation and heat death. It also suggests that the very forms and principles of matter–all the way up to General Relativity–might be broken down and radically reorganized at different times during the unfolding of this process. Check it out:
http://www.universetoday.com/81648/the-big-bounce/
March 6, 2012 at 3:35 am
Great post! Looks like the clock on this blog might be off because it says every comment was posted in the middle of the night, and you only posted this a few hours ago (and it is 10:30 right now). Just thought you should know in case there is a tech problem.
March 6, 2012 at 1:23 pm
Pasquinelli’s text ‘Four Regimes of Entropy…’ is an interesting take on rethinking entropy across different landscapes. He breaks it down into four- the digital, mechanical, biological, and mineral. Each subject to different kinds of temporality- but to my mind there would, inevitably, be more than four regimes. Entropies within entropies. Bodies crossed by countless lines of temporality, reversible irreversible systems negotiating with each other; entropy is just a different measure of that temporality. I’m borrowing from Serres’ playbook here.
Here is the Pasquinelli text: http://seventeen.fibreculturejournal.org/fcj-117-four-regimes-of-entropy-for-an-ecology-of-genetics-and-biomorphic-media-theory/
Also, somewhere in the past months I’ve read a conversation recalled by Claude Shannon: “My greatest concern was what to call it. I thought of calling it ‘information’, but the word was overly used, so I decided to call it ‘uncertainty’. When I discussed it with John von Neumann, he had a better idea. Von Neumann told me, ‘You should call it entropy, for two reasons. In the first place your uncertainty function has been used in statistical mechanics under that name, so it already has a name. In the second place, and more important, nobody knows what entropy really is, so in a debate you will always have the advantage.'” ;-)
March 6, 2012 at 2:41 pm
http://www.kqed.org/a/forum/R201203051000
Robert Sapolsky on our love of stress
March 7, 2012 at 8:32 am
well, I have to read this more slowly! I guess you’ve come across Schrodinger’s
‘what is life’ (available on the web). A lot on living systems as negentropic.
And then there is Palindrome by Mario Crocco…Which I have mentioned one or two times.
“IT FEEDS ON ‘NEGATIVE ENTROPY’
It is by avoiding the rapid decay into the inert
state of ‘equilibrium’ that an organism appears so
enigmatic; so much so, that from the earliest
times of human thought some special
non-physical or supernatural force (vis viva,
entelechy) was claimed to be operative in the
organism, and in some quarters is still claimed.
How does the living organism avoid decay?”
Schrodinger
“ORGANIZATION MAINTAINED BY
EXTRACTING ‘ORDER’ FROM THE
ENVIRONMENT
How would we express in terms of the statistical
theory the marvellous faculty of a living
organism, by which it delays the decay into
thermodynamical equilibrium (death)? We said
before: ‘It feeds upon negative entropy’,
attracting, as it were, a stream of negative
entropy upon itself, to compensate the entropy
increase it produces by living and thus to
maintain itself on a stationary and fairly low
entropy level. If D is a measure of disorder, its
reciprocal, l/D, can be regarded as a direct
measure of order. Since the logarithm of l/D is
just minus the logarithm of D, we can write
Boltzmann’s equation thus:
-(entropy) = k log (l/D).
Hence the awkward expression ‘negative entropy’
can be he replaced by a better one: entropy,
taken with the negative sign, is itself a measure
of order. Thus the device by which an organism
maintains itself stationary at a fairly high level of
he orderliness ( = fairly low level of entropy)
really consists continually sucking orderliness
from its environment.” Schrodinger
March 7, 2012 at 8:46 am
I’ve always been somewhat confused by definitions of entropy in terms of probability. It makes perfect sense if I think about molecules of gas in a closed chamber; but on the scale of the universe as a whole in space and time, why is it that entropy is assumed to be more probable than “negentropy”? In the universe we observe (which includes ourselves as observers), there seems to be no reason to assume that disorderliness is anymore probable than orderliness. I see more reason to assume the opposite. Clearly, objects tend to age; but in the case of organisms, the process of aging is also (for the first half of life at least) a process of development and complexification. Phylogenically, organic life has moved from the very simple (prokaryotes) through various stages to the very complex (social mammals). I’ve read complexity theorists who account for this negentropic movement in terms of the tendency of matter to seek equilibrium of energy gradients. But what produces these gradients in the first place? Doesn’t matter also have a tendency to congeal, to fold in upon itself, to complexify? If so, why do we refer to this tendency in the negative, as if it were incidental to the dominant entropic tendency of nature? What about the more neutral term “centropy”?
March 7, 2012 at 8:59 am
Contra Brassier’s nihilism, I agree with Tim Morton (http://ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com/2011/06/whos-minding-store.html). The ethical implications of eliminativism are not quite as rosy as you paint them, me thinks.
March 7, 2012 at 11:24 am
Certainly, we all speak our own vocabularies. “But the soul of man is not words,” says Artaud. That we cannot leave it at that tells something about our disorder. Disorder of the soul, disorder in the words. (To the point that you dream of utopia: matching each up.)
Nancy says that sense only secondarily has something to do with information (sensory or intellectual information). No, firstly, sense — and it doesn’t form a unity, it’s the order of multiple senses which don’t make up an easy “unity” — or rather, the unity of our sense is our world— sense has to do with entering a movement, with embracing, touching, acknowledging (i.e., not codifying, perhaps not understanding) — that is, to sense is to touch upon a subject for the sheer sake of touching on a subject. And before anything, what’s subect is subect to a touch. Put otherwise, it’s touch is what makes it; what touches it makes it; it’s made by what it touches. Without lucidity, you can be sure: it’s madness.
That doesn’t mean there’s no information. For example, “scandal” translates the Hebrew and Greek for “stumbling block, trap, snare.” Rene Girard uses scandal very specifically; here is the provided paraphrase: “[Scandal] means specifically a situation which comes about when a person or a group of persons feel themselves blocked or obstructed as they desire some specific object of power, prestige, or property that their model possesses
March 7, 2012 at 12:13 pm
…or is imagined to possess.” All I know so far is that the scandal inevitably comes to a breaking point, violence erupts; but I have yet to read the book.
In this sense, I find it best to remember that one is as island without power. Without power over other islands, but also without power over the things that sprout, the species that flourish, or the epochs that get buried — an island without power over its own terrain to the point that time alone spins it (when in reality, it is the earth that spins — but then where?). You cannot help but connect Nancy’s thesis that “The world rests on nothing” here. That nothing is in the substance, it’s pure powerlessness, that which makes it “worthy” itself, because here isn’t entered into a gradient of values, a checklist for value. But then what? I mean, what can we check ourselves against? If everything exceeds whatever value I might put on it (I’m using “values” as a generic word for “qualities, attributes, features, forms”), then what about my place in this epifold form? If my point of comraderie with all things is at the very point where I’m powerless grasp them in any way, what does that say about my own health, my own personage (my body language, my values, my discourse, etc.)?
Going this way, we start to ask the wrong questions. But on the other hand, there cannot be wrong ones; so why not ask them?
In this sense, I think we are within our rights to focus our studies — on “consciousness” if you like. Laura Riding once called it the “individual-unreal,” which resisted being swallowed by Nature (what has become) or History (what is becoming), thus avoiding the “individual-real” (idea of a human) or “collective-real” (idea of a humanity). It accredits me as a “separate being” — something isolated, cut off, by giving credit in full to my unreality. We’re pointing toward an ontology of unreality, then, and not consciousness. I think we are close then, once again, close to the idea that each thing is itself (is nothing?) before it is anything else “to” anything else. This would be it’s individual-unreal– it’s consciousness.
But I’m a thinker of the collective-unreal, so I will move on from this for now. Let me close with what I’d planned to be my starting note: passages from Artaud relating directly to the questions of terminology and anxiety and disintegration.
One does not come close to the sacrificial spectacle without it becoming a violent reality for themselves. This violence becomes lucid when the object of the sacrifice turns out to be you (or your intelligence) — and that there is no sacrifice, there being nothing to sacrifice and nothing to sacrifice yourself to (no ground of transcendence, period; transcendence, if anything, is movement).
Artaud experienced being as this zero-point I’ve been alluding to, but which I can’t call back. Pure equanmity-transitivity of being-nothing. In Artaud, this meant the disorder of thought; and yet he wants to preserve and keep his thoughts at all costs. To do so, he captures every form that rushes up to his mind. This capture will change over time. Here is 1923:
“My thought abandons me at every level. From the simple fact of thought to the external fact of its materialization in words. Words, shapes of sentences, internal directions of thought, simple reactions of the mind– I am in constant pursuit of my intellectual being. Thus as soon as I can grasp a form, however imperfect, I pin it down, for fear of losing the whole thought. I lower myself, I know, and I suffer from it, but I consent to it for fear of dying altogether.”
As if the pursuit of his intellectual being were the only way the inexistent atom could meant the swerve or curve that engenders it, as if the nothing had to touch a fabric that held every nothing up as nothing, and for nothing, but so for them alone. Artaud’s impotence, and his declaration of such, had to become a feature of the fabric whose only consistency was articulating, because he was both himself, nothing, and this very fabric — in the rootings of the nothing of the being the fabric upheld or helped crash down:
“A powerlessness to crystallize unconsciously the broken point of the mechanism to any degree at all. (The Nerve Matter1925)
“… these forms took pleasure in tantalizing the mind by disappearing or disintegrating too soon, maddening the mind that was trying to grasp them. […] It is quite clear that the destructive element which demineralizes the mind and deprives it of its first assumptions is not concerned with knowing whether the mind will keep its sorrows for its personal use or apply them to something more impersonal which in other circumstances might have served as the basis of some kind of work, some kind of product! No one will ever really know what makes the mind decide in favor of creation.”(Letter of 1932)
March 7, 2012 at 12:40 pm
It’s impossible for me to wrap up the story with Artaud. What do I do, continue to cite fragments?
“Less immediately accessible, they disclose their secrets gradually.” This is what comes after Artaud has briefly criticized Picasso for stratining too hard to think according to the classified, determined forms, for taking his art as an ‘end’ rather than a ‘means’, for defining himself too much and not expressing himself enough. He references an older time, an older picasso, whose paintings, “defined only themselves and that small part of the world which they re-created to their liking. Less immediately accessible, they disclosed their secrets gradually. A prodigious life force crackled through their dense lines, an unknown and profound reality in which the whole soul recognized itself.”(1925, Picasso Exhibit)
Whatever we say, we cannot be the masters of our mind. A sacrifice is demanded, a scandal that will burst the bars off — and the bars are always ones own, the sensation is always one of breaking ones own barriers. I don’t prefer this language of sacrifice and barriers. But the vocabulary of “the self’s concomitant alterity” isn’t satisfying either (even if by clarity I mean se* in general, reflexivity, the thing of the thing). All of the parentheses leave us obliviated, a generalized forgetting of thought that simultaneously signified the revenge of the Object on us. Fight or interchange, it fights back, there’s an interchange. Better yet, there’s a movement — consciousness, transcendence.
But by the end of it, you’ve just flung some paint on the wall — which serves you right, for knowing anything.
March 7, 2012 at 2:18 pm
Matthew,
The thesis is not that entropy is more probable in the universe, but that the degree of entropy in a system is a measure of probability in that system. Your questions about gradients suffers from the same problem as intelligent design arguments in biology. You’re basically saying that if there’s order there must have been a designer or an author and are unable to conceive emergent order without authorship.
March 7, 2012 at 2:21 pm
I think those are some pretty peculiar conclusions to draw from eliminativism, but I’ll also not that I said nothing about eliminativism in this post and am therefore perplexed as to why you posted this link.
March 7, 2012 at 2:25 pm
In the end, we just don’t know….and we experience that not knowing as unsatisfactory.
What happens if we start there?
March 7, 2012 at 3:17 pm
Matthew,
I’m in no position to speak to the situation of the universe, but, in the case of our local energy sink, the earth, remember that we receive lots of ‘free’ energy from the sun and the life binds that energy to itself through photosynthesis. That energy is free in the sense that no energy is expended on earth in order to get those photons here.
March 7, 2012 at 4:45 pm
Entropy: it’s not what it used to be.
March 7, 2012 at 8:36 pm
Reblogged this on abstractgeology.
March 8, 2012 at 9:45 pm
Levi,
I certainly would not want to conjure up a transcendent designer. That is why I spoke of matter itself having the tendency to complexify. My comment was not an attempt to suggest we need a designer to account for cosmic order. My point was that order seems no less probable than disorder on the cosmological scale. This makes the term “negentropy” seem inappropriate, since it defines order as if it were the accident and entropy the necessity. If we assume something like the big bang model is correct, then leaning on entropy to explain away all the order in the universe as an accidental by-product requires positing that the universe began in a state of hyper-improbability/zero-entropy.
Instead of positing something so improbable because of what seems to me to be an extra-philosophical commitment to nihilism (where everything inevitably is blindly running down towards heat death), why not posit a tendency to life/organization right alongside the tendency to death/dispersal? More appropriate terms for the former tendency might be “centropy,” or “exergy,” which could be understood to operate alongside entropy as the two poles of some more basic, ineffable power/energy underlying the creation and destruction of everything.
March 8, 2012 at 10:13 pm
[…] Bryant recently posted about Entropy. He writes: Entropy is the measure of order in any system. In this regard, to take a rough and […]
March 13, 2012 at 8:32 pm
Bill,
Yeah, I get that. The earth gets lots of exergy from the sun. I’ve read both Prigogine and Margulis write about the drastic energy gradient created by the difference in temperature between sunlight, deep space, and the surface of the earth being responsible for the emergence of life and evolution. Life emerges and continues to complexify in order to get more and more efficient at dissipating that gradient so as to move toward equilibrium. It makes sense as a model, but of course it cannot possibly be a full explanation for life. If anything, it suggests that what we normally consider to be organic activity is just higher octane inorganic activity. I’m all for breaking down the false dichotomy between living matter and dead matter. It’s all living! But this is precisely the confusion of my original comment here: why say the reverse, that all matter is dead or dying (entropy reigns), when clearly there is another tendency that seems just as widespread (live, centropy)?
The sun gives a lot of free energy to the earth, yes. But where did the sun come from? If the entropic model is accurate, you’d think that after a cosmic explosion (i.e., the big bang), you wouldn’t find matter/energy organizing itself into such complex and delicately balanced systems as stars. I’m sure there are ways of explaining this within the entropic model, but it seems like a stretch to me, a result of some extra-scientific emotional attachment to the idea that all order in the universe is accidental. Contrary to Levi’s claims about the ethical implications of nihilism, this seems to me to be a sort of psychological rationalization or coping mechanism designed to repress the cosmic weight of moral responsibility in a universe where value is more than a human contrivance.
March 13, 2012 at 10:56 pm
Matthew,
A couple of points. First, I think you’re misunderstanding the concept of entropy. You seem to be equating entropy with heat death. Yet in this post I explicitly rail against that concept of entropy. Entropy is a measure of order and disorder, not heat death. My claim is that every organized system struggles with dissolution or entropy. That’s very different than claiming that entropy is the ultimate outcome of the universe. Indeed, in the post, I say that I’m inclined to side with Deleuze on this issue. Deleuze argues against the thesis that entropy is the ultimate destination of the universe in Difference and Repetition. In your remarks here you seem fixated on a concept of entropy that just doesn’t appear in this post nor my other work.
Second, I vehemently disagree with the following:
This is an incredibly odd claim to make with respect to what I’ve said about entropy and entirely ignores what I’ve said. What have I said? I have said that where there is no afterlife and where it is recognized that destruction/dissolution is always lurking around the corner, our attention is turned towards this world and preserving and caring for this world. In other words, far from undermining our sense of responsibility to the ecosystem in which we live, other entities, the social world, etc., the recognition that things are irreplaceable (that there are no eternal Platonic forms, for example), that we won’t exist for eternity in an afterlife, that there won’t be some final revolutionary moment of reconciliation, etc., deepens our responsibility to this world. By contrast, thoughts of the afterlife, eternal forms, and messianism cheapen this world, cultivating a sense that this world, these living things, these ecosystems, etc., do not matter. It is messianism, thoughts of the afterlife, and thoughts of the eternal that are psychological rationalizations and coping mechanisms designed to help us to escape from the great responsibility that we have.
March 14, 2012 at 1:39 am
Levi,
I think I understand what you mean by entropy, but maybe I am missing something. In what I’ve suggested so far, I’ve been using “entropy” to mean the tendency for a system to move toward disorder/disorganization. I agree with you that every system has an enthropic tendency. My original comment here concerned the reality of an opposite tendency toward increasing order/organization. Rather than call this latter tendency “negentropy” (which implies it is an accidental byproduct of the dominant entropic trend), I suggested less metaphysically biased terms like “exergy” or “centropy.” Based on what we know empirically about the pervasiveness of self-organization in the universe, it seems more appropriate to me to recognize these two polarized forces as working together to create, maintain, and destroy order in the universe. It seems inaccurate to me to say that disorder is more probable in the universe than order. If we are talking about controlled laboratory settings or abstract models of closed systems, then yes, entropy is the dominant tendency. But so far as I know, there are no closed systems in the real world. Whether any of this contradicts your point in this post, I’m not sure. My original reason for posting was to express my confusion and misgivings regarding the terminology (“negentropy”).
March 14, 2012 at 2:00 am
Matthew,
Clearly you don’t. You write:
Entropy is a measure of disorder or equaprobability in a system full stop. Some systems tend towards greater entropy (gasses introduced into a chamber), not all. You’re tilting at a windmill of your own making here. Negentropy, by contrast, consists of the activities of a system that maintain their order, full stop.
As for your claims about closed and opened systems, it’s just a simple fact that the universe has tended towards greater entropy. Why? Because all matter was localized in one point at the big bang (improbability) and after the big bang it has become increasingly dispersed throughout space (higher probability). I realize that your intelligent design theory doesn’t like this, but those are currently the facts of the matter based on observation as best we understand them. If you wish to deny that matter has become and is becoming increasingly dispersed throughout space you’ve undermined the possibility of dialogue (by denying observable facts) and are in the grips of a theory.
March 14, 2012 at 3:04 am
Levi,
“it’s just a simple fact that the universe has tended towards greater entropy. Why? Because all matter was localized in one point at the big bang (improbability) and after the big bang it has become increasingly dispersed throughout space (higher probability).”
I don’t think this line of reasoning works, since space, too, emerged with the big bang. Matter isn’t dispersing itself throughout empty space, since matter isn’t fundamentally separate from space. I think observation reveals two basic tendencies at the largest scale: 1) for matter to congeal into galaxies due to something for now called “dark matter,” 2) for the space between galaxies to expand exponentially due to something for now called “dark energy.”
I think the situation in cosmology is rather open-ended at this point… we have observations in excess of theory… we need MORE theory to account for the strangeness of the observations.
March 15, 2012 at 4:27 am
Great stuff. Thanks. I hadn’t heard of negentropy. But I’m not sure I get this part: “substances, entities, or objects are negentropic systems. An object is a highly ordered system. Or, amounting to the same thing, an object is a highly improbable being.” Aren’t some objects more highly ordered than others? Your statement seems to elide the gradations among objects in terms of how entropic they are. Aren’t there objects that come into being and persist for a very short time and have a high degree of entropy–and yet keep their status as objects? I can’t think of a good example at the moment. . . . What about a crowd of fans at a rock concert pushing for the stage? It’s a decentralized object, with no one mind consciously controlling it, but it has some kind of intentionality. No?
March 21, 2012 at 9:25 pm
[…] as autopoietic objects produce their own elements and relations between these elements, they are negentropic (“negation of entropy”). Negentropic objects attempt to maintain their […]
May 24, 2012 at 11:01 pm
[…] sustain themselves. It is these flows that allow “multiples of multiples” to stave off entropy and constitute themselves as units or beings. Without this porosity they would evaporate into a […]
June 9, 2013 at 3:20 am
[…] written a lot about this over the years (you can start here if you’re interested), so I won’t say too much about it here. Anyway, this point […]
January 25, 2016 at 3:07 pm
[…] — “Entropy and me” by Larval Subjects (linklink) […]