Feeding Entropy <=> Receiving Energy

Preface F (prefaces to books I probably won't have time to write)

When I won my love (better: when my love conquered me) was when I realized what I stood to lose: her. Still, love never felt precarious as it’s its own guide. A guide through possibilities that loom ominous, true, but that always leave an opening of trust. Trust, a slingshot argument that, oddly, defies the odds. Simply put: entropy needs to be fed, not fled. Perpetuum mobiles in classical physics always remain the same. As unmoved movers, they are separated from the rest of the world; they don’t exchange energy with anything outside it. Separated, they annoy entropy, so entropy eats them by ultimately reducing them to their parts hoping they start bonding again. Living beings too, being moved by others, show emotion (to wit: we move out of the mere witless rut of merely being individuals). The unmagical formulae this book proposes is: energy exchanged = entropy fed with possibility = being energized. 

One feeds entropy by making bonds. Every bond creates new possibilities. Every new possibility makes entropy tick up¹. My love & I created three kids who in turn create new loves and friendships. A veritable feast for entropy that obviously could not care less whether the one, the other or all three of our children die, but positively revels in the endless possibilities that are created; that can but do not have to be destroyed. The feast of entropy lies in ever more possibility. It gladly pays for the delicacy in allowing more energy for yet more bonds. And, true, love may consume, but bad outcomes need not be consumed². If bonds of trust are secured one surfs that energy by bonding yet more profusely. And so entropy wins again. As energy wins. Happily complementary, entropy and energy play around like two dogs trying to sniff each other’s behinds. No matter whether it is solar systems or cells or multicellular organisms or my wife and I and our three kids and their friends and lovers and interests.

So there it is: the grounding of cultural optimism in the very first principles of nature. A perpetuum mobile of another sort: a perpetuum mobile of consorts (the more types of consorts the better as entropy hates norms). We act to understand each other as best we can, meaning we try to explain why an other acts the way they do. The first of these feeds entropy, in the second we receive the energy to continue with the first. Endless hermeneutical circles of trying to understand each other so as to make better - more bountiful - bonds (from tail-sniffing over hugging to philosophy!³). As long as there is enough trust, this can go on eternally. In any a philosophy of atheism, trust, therefore, needs to be central because even if the grounding of cultural optimism is superstable, it doesn’t mean a contingent cultural edifice can’t come down. Just like I can lose her by misunderstandings that remain unexplained, culminating in distrust that sends the bond of love spiraling down, reducing us to individual atoms bouncing off each other without desire for understanding (sulking in self-serving explanations). Entropy then turns its back and energy dissipates. All is downhill from there in clean mathematical equations that need only deal with ends-in-themselves.

We live in a post-trust world where we have been led to believe that truth is never soft and kind (like parenting or playing), but always harsh and mean (like showing off or competing). People flee a post-trust world, preferring any post-truth world to a world that cannot but collapse on itself. The truth is that trust is indispensable. We are born as babies and growing up means that we realize that we’ll remain somewhat helpless (babies) until we die. Harsh, ugly truth is the ultimate - free-energy minimizing - lie. It reduces life to a computation of a gradient descent looking for an uneasy equilibrium that optimizes individual survival. This is a hard-to-parse sentence. Still, unpacking it shows that it packs a real punch. It captures the essence of this, our, post-trust world where we are hell-bent on safeguarding ourselves at the expense of others; where, like little annoying perpetuum mobiles, we are only out to defend our privilege against all external surprise. “No rest for the wicked.”, goes the saying, because the wicked need to hedge their bets by frantically placing more of them than their competitors. In such a world all our love is lost because love stands in the way of holding on to advantages previously acquired. In such a world we are just machines calculating the path of least resistance to maintain an awkward balance which allows us to remain on top of things. Enter entropy to remind us that, energetically, it is all downhill from here toward zero Kelvin (passing, briefly, over global warming as if entropy is rolling its eyes). 

Take the climactic example of climate change: holding on to our industrial advantage, the West locks in a modern lifestyle at the expense of human (and non-human) others. The more we think ‘There Is No Alternative!’, the more entropy chips away at our self-destructive culture, one centigrade at a time. The irony of post-trust culture is that it sincerely believes it embodies true progress (in having overcome naïve superstitions), but is blind to it necessarily self-destructing in a way very similar to its technological holy grail ‘nuclear option’. It will melt down as it focuses energy on one point instead of simply going with the flow of creating possibilities pleasing entropy and energizing as many as possible⁴. The only inconvenient truth is that the one-sided ‘measurement views’ of scientific progress measurably lead to catastrophe⁵.

I will be accused of a too metaphorical understanding of nature. That accusation will come from those who entrench computational metaphors as the only heart of science. In this book I expose why computation camouflaging as science (reducing particles to waves or waves to particles, equating understanding to explanation, ...) is at the heart of our increasing Dystopian feeling. Modernity seeks reasons not to bond, establishing ideals of society that needn’t engage with injustice against non-ideal, different selves⁶. What we feel is the brunt of the Utopian ideal of a perpetuum mobile society that only has space for citizens who are fully in control of their environment: and, content with their privilege on top of the food chain, are unable to bond with it. This book does not throw away computational scientific progress. Instead it will show how trust can keep futures open to genuine external surprise without further narrowing the conception of humanity to the middle-aged cis heteronormative male perspective of dominating one’s world. By giving pride of place to the capacity for bonding, it will hopefully show how cultural optimism commits us to being pessimistic about cultures - like the present Eurocentric one - that believe in their own supremacy as the last possible culture.

PS: This is a series of prefaces of books that I will not write. If Derrida is right then it are the prefaces and footnotes that are truly telling, so why bother to try tell the truth? There will be 26 of them in all - and if you are good readers I might even tell you why (good readers, by the way, are readers that make comments or vote in the polls).

1. I need to cite here the quite fantastic paper that may have just in time fed entropy enough for the whole practice of academic publishing not to collapse entirely on itself (read it and weep a little about how long Schrödinger has spoilt both quantum physics and a proper sense of life)): Jeffery, K.; Pollack, R.; Rovelli, C. On the Statistical Mechanics of Life: Schrödinger Revisited. Entropy 2019, 21, 1211.

2. One could read Kierkegaard as wanting to jump away from love out of despair. Clinging to God is a way of chickening out of the odds that entropy allows. Bad odds indeed if one isn’t prepared to go all out on the highest energy bond and consequently is condemned to live on the fumes, a.k.a. rent, of one’s privilege. A lack of entropy leads to a melancholy longing for a time that never was: a time when one had a privilege that one deserved (like a perpetuum mobile, a contradictio in entropis).

3. And back again, of course. Maybe true philosophy is only found in the “acknowledgements sections” ;-).

4. Why not a Buddhism reference? Billionaire entrepreneurs try to compute the literal escape from climate change by interplanetary vessel. Obviously this is the free-energy minimizing solution for the happy few, as it will only allow them to escape to the new Nirvana. This is Hinayana Buddhism taken to literal extremes of small vessels allowing only the privileged to escape. My law of cultural optimism is firmly Mahayania in spirit. The only viable escape vessel is that which can carry all of us: Earth. Anything smaller implodes on account of its (meta)physical inability to create enough new possibilities to carry its own weight. (This is not an attack on interplanetary travel, I will forever remain a dedicated Trekkie!)

5. Another book may have to be written on how Arendt’s analysis of Socrates and Simondon’s analysis of becoming are in line with postcolonial critiques of Eurocentric Enlightenment having dozed off in a dogmatic slumber of self-congratulatory complacence about its final blow to all dogmatic slumber. As if entropy would admit such ultimate end to end all ends. Hybris about the Enlightened Individual will seal our collective human and planetary end. It is a primitive culture that dies by ridiculing ‘primitive’ cultures.

6.  I wrote this on the day of the death of Charles Mills. This is an acknowledgement.

Credits image: Susana Fernandez via flickr.