The Entropy Tango

This phrase was coined by Michael Moorcock about 30 years ago, as a title in his long-running Jerry Cornelius writings. To me, it is something stately and inexorable, the dance that must by necessity lead to the final heat death of the universe.

If everything flows and nothing remains still (as Heraclitus the Ephesian said), there is no final death. But entropy, the state of gradual loss which comes with this motion, ensures that all things come to an end.

Heraclitus was the ancient who first came up with the concept of ὁδὸς ἄνω κάτω, the 'path upwards and downwards'. The phrase, read in English as hodos anö katö, or anodos/kathodos, is what electrochemists get their terms 'anode' and 'cathode' from; one is the upward path of the electrons and one is the downward path (and of course, elektrodos means 'amber path' or 'path of electrons'). But Heraclitus never factored in resistance and loss of power in his circuitous musings.

Which is what brings us back to the entropy tango. All things go round and round, up and down, but eventually, the ability to do anything productive wanes. Things equilibrate. At the end, all the lovely dancers fall down within their ring of roses.

No cell lasts for ever; no volta will bridge the dying electronic ga(s)p of the stricken system. But while the passionate embrace continues, life goes on. It is rather sobering, however, to note that the greater the energies expended, the more passionate the expression, the quicker the end. It is the choice of Achilles — to burn quickly and die a legend, or to burn slowly and die forgotten.

But either way, it is the entropy tango, danced quickly or slowly in the ballroom of time.

Systemic or Societal?

Last night I was having one of those interesting Facebook intercommentarial episodes — things that aren't quite conversations or discussions but approximate them through roughly alternating comments on a post. The Thunderer's get was protagonist, so I suppose in a sense I was antagonist, although not in the modern sense.

The underlying issue was whether a certain system was crazy or not. Personally, I always go for etymology before thinking about significance. The word 'crazy' means 'fragmented', and it is in this sense that things are 'cracked', 'flawed' or otherwise 'broken'. It implies a lack of consistency at the very least and a lack of coherence or integrity at more subtle levels. Clearly, a system can be crazy.

But the overall issue seemed to be whether crazy people had made a crazy system or whether a crazy system had made crazy people. And here I paused to think.

The real conflict was that, in the kinds of systems we were discussing, people were integral components. If the people were nuts, the system (no matter how designed) would behave sub-optimally. But this, in the long term, is true of any system — it slides into increasing entropy. The Thunderer's get averred (perhaps with some sarcasm) that it was easy to say this, since the Second Law said as much.

My point was that empirically, systems collapse not in the very long heat-death-of-the-universe sense but in the much shorter span of generations. If a generation is 30 years, evolving systems like the American experiment in constitutional democracy have only lasted less than 10 generations. The first of my ancestors to leave eastern Eurasia and move to south-eastern Eurasia did so around that time; he lived from 1751 to 1801. The local mercantile/political experiment of my forefathers is thus an experiment just as old and I have empirical knowledge of it.

In the much smaller system of my clan, we have diversified pretty broadly (although not as much as the American system, with vastly greater numbers of inputs and functions). But I am absolutely certain that none of us hews closely to the attitude of our patriarch. If he had drafted a constitution, it might have slowed the entropy and diversification; if we had spent more time planning (as if we'd been a corporate institution) we might have kept the focus narrower. But neither of these possibilities is easy to evaluate.

The Thunderer's get also pointed out that certain systems obviously produced better (more rational, more useful etc) results than others. This is certainly true. But it is also about as useful as the finding that all systems fail because it is also a truism. No two systems can be alike, or they would not be two systems; they'd be one. If they were not alike, their outputs would be different either in terms of process or product, and hence different in impact on their implementors, environments and users.

Of course, in a purely mathematical system, this might not be true; you can indeed produce the same result by different process, and if a machine does it, there is little or no impact on human users. But that particular qualification — human — is the nub of the issue.

In any system, the tendency to entropy is greatest in the most complex element. The higher the level of development, the greater the distance from the baseline and the harder it is to sustain. This can be empirically and experimentally verified. In most of the systems under discussion, humans are involved, and they are the most complex elements of these systems.

This then was the process by which I reached the following point of contention: I said that all systems tend towards the mediocre and the Thunderer's get disagreed, citing the fact that some systems were better than others. I think that both of us were true in a very trivial sense (see above) but that taken together, these two truths give a higher truth: no matter how hard you strive to make something better, it will one day, in the not-so-distant future, be made less good by humans.

The challenge therefore is to overdesign systems so that humans can't mess them up. And of course, the more you overdesign a system, the more potential for entropy you create and the more effort you spend. You are taking away resources from somewhere else to do that work. You are fighting the inevitable, perhaps in a very laudable way, but mediocrity lurks nearby, always at your shoulder. It is the dark twin.

It is right to resist mediocrity. But this can only be done by changing the system every now and then. The other challenge is to know when to expend that effort and suffer that pain.

In all, one should conclude that the main point of human striving, systemically speaking, is to expend effort in setting up systems that resist entropy to some continuing and useful end. Society, on the other hand, cannot be that end in itself. So what is?

The Argument from Lack-of-Design

I'm not an advocate of intelligent design. If God decided to make His design look incomprehensible to us, He could do it if He wanted. Just because anybody thinks something is designed doesn't mean it is.

However, I am opposed to what I call the argument from lack-of-design. To counter the idea that the appearance of design implies a designer (clearly, it can't), some people say that enough things are so badly designed that their ostensible designer can't have been very intelligent. Cue examples such as weird DNA sequences, knee joints, the apparatus of the human eye.

Actually, this is a very amusing argument. Let's see why this is so.

To begin with, let's define design as a process in which a situation of lower statistical entropy is planned and executed. By this we mean that the number of possible routes to reach a specific configuration of particles is deliberately decreased by the application of intelligence to action. Ideally, if there is only one possible route and there are many particles, then entropy is minimised for that set of particles.

This assumes a few things, mostly non-provable: an intelligence that can design, a will that can execute a design, a perceptive apparatus that can rate design as 'more intelligent' or 'less intelligent' and the power to execute a design without contravening its own logical underpinnings.

But the logical continuation is fascinating. Suppose we had a perfect intelligence (however defined) and it created a zero-entropy universe (by definition, a perfect design). Then what would it be like? The answer, I suppose, in the context of what we seem to know, is that it would immediately begin to fall apart into a random state of higher entropy. It would unwind, with patches of relatively higher and lower entropy randomly distributed.

It would produce situations in which any subordinate intelligence would have the potential for suffering, since such intelligences would be subject to local differences in entropy and probably able to recognize if they were 'better off' or 'worse off'. Those that were 'worse off' by any criterion would be 'suffering' from an objective point of view, and also 'suffering' from a subjective point of view if there were what we would call a time-based emotional component.

The inescapable conclusion is that the perfect design would necessarily create an imperfect universe in which suffering was one of many logical outcomes. What a bummer, you'd think, except that the fact of existence is a pretty good trade-off for some people.

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Random Notes:

Wait a minute, some Lack-of-Design enthusiasts might say. Isn't there evidence that the human eye is evolved to be better than, say, a mere photosensitive patch? Actually, no. It's more vulnerable to injury. But it's not worse. It can't see into far UV or receive radio waves for decoding. But it's not worse. It's not anything except what you want it for (or what you already have). If it could do better than it does, it wouldn't necessarily be a human eye. But humans are greedy and want X-ray vision. You'd need something like metal nerves for that. Could God have made it better? Well, my question would be, "What ever for?"

Also, the human knee (for example) could be in many states, some better, some worse. There would be no perfect knee. There would only be subjectively better knees and subjectively worse knees. For every 'better knee', some criterion could be located for which it would be a 'worse knee'. A zero-entropy knee would not be a knee at all. Think about it.

Entropy in Real Life House Clearance

There are many things that students of chemistry learn about entropy. One of the more famous equations is the Gibbs Free Energy Equation: ∆G=∆H - T∆S. Essentially, this says that things are more likely to happen when you don't have to put effort into them and you just let them degenerate.

This applies to house clearing and spring cleaning too. If you just keep records of how much mail is received by a single (especially, academic) household, you will realise that in a finite time, the house will be full of old mail.

This mail of course has an expiry date; special offers and coupons run out, magazine subscriptions expire, magazines themselves are no longer current. But if the household does not acknowledge these sensible boundary conditions, the mail accumulates, becoming more and more useless and taking up more and more space.

It is a spontaneous accumulation of stuff within the little universe of the home. But it isn't actually a good example of entropy because the system isn't closed. There are, after all, garbage collectors and offspring who will help get rid of stuff. There are rag-and-bone men, there are house-cleaning services. For a little outlay, which is not quite the same as energy, you can get it all cleaned up for you.

What is more worrying, I think, is the idea of entopy. I define 'entopy' as running out of space before you run out of anything else. The state of ultimate or relative entopy can be called 'entopia', I suppose.

Meditation on Entropy

I'm still reading the Old Testament book of 1st Samuel. It's about 30 chapters of pure action, interspersed with odd meditative episodes and powerful rhetoric, drama, emotion and the scent of death. What strikes me about this book is that it is one of the earliest books which is actually written like a novel. The characters have discernible motives and the plot shows signs of non-prophetic foreshadowing and other literary devices.

The whole thing is very different from the near-legendary exploits of the Israelites as they journeyed out from Egypt and into the Promised Land. Rather, it is the story of a people now linked to their land and behaving like ordinary people, yet touched with the shadow of the Almighty.

But as you read further into the text, you see entropy creeping in. People wind down, give in to lower-energy decision-making, to summary rather than expansion. They make bad choices which you know will get them in the long term. Worse, in the light of what we now know, the roots of the tragedy of the Jewish Holocaust were laid then; the seed was planted when they decided to get for themselves a king.

It lifts you up to see how much effort went into the avoidance of disaster, how much input was given to raise these people against the burden of entropy. That they took so long to self-destruct and lose their Promised Land is the miracle of the tale.

Inevitability

There are many things in life which are inevitable or nearly so: death, disease, disaster, delirium, dementia, despair – just to name a few. But they are things most of us hope will never happen. We don't normally think about the thin line between the inevitable and the unthinkable. But it is there, and it is breached once in a while.

There are all these boundaries we don't think about. How much do you push someone before they crash through? How much do you abuse the environment before it collapses into a different phase?

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Inevitability

we turn in dwindling inclusion
to define where we are at,
trapped in narrower seclusion
by tightening legal caveat -
for the threat of execution
dwarfs the execution of threat

from the height see how the land lies,
each hazard hid within its bower;
clad in white men with clubs realise
importance of four holes an hour -
for the power of joint exercise
masks the joint exercise of power

we - scorpion race that raises fire
(venom of stars in sting of faith;
the tighter turn in heat of ire,
the closer stilling of our breath) -
know: the death of all desire
follows all desire of death