372. A world of entropy?

Could we see the world as one big buzz, on may levels, of loops going around between high and low entropy? Let me try this out, in a list of phenomena of humanity and society. Here I distinguish between the two dimensions of entropy: the number of possible states or alternatives, and diversity, the distinctions between them.

                                             

alternatives     diversity          entropy

life                              many               high                 low      many forms, each unique

death                           many               low                  high     undifferentiated mass

monopoly                    few                  low                  low      few but homogeneous products

competition                 many               low                  high     many of similar products

innovation                   few                 high                 low      unique product

nationalism                 many               high                 low      many different unique nations          

authoritarian               few                 low                  low      no or a single party

democracy                  many               high                 low      different political parties

capitalism                    many/low        high/low          low      uniqueness in entrepreneurial and

monopoly in concentrated capitalism

communism                few                 low                  high     one size fits all

integration                  few                 low                  low      many similar things brought into one

disintegration              many               low                  high     falling apart in autonomous units

dense network            many                                      high     many connections between many nodes

high centrality net.     few                                         high     a few nodes have many connections

war/revolutionn          many               high                 high     breakdown of order into factions

peace                           few                 low                  high     preservation of order

the face (Levinas)       few                 high                 low      the unique other

justice                         few                 low                  high     equality under the law for many

destruction                  many               low                  high     loss of order

excitement                  few                 high                 low      peak

boredom                     many               low                  high     no clear preference, nothing salient

poetry                         few                 high                 low      irregular meaning

bureaucracy                few                 low                  high     equalization

art                               few                 high                 low      unique, diversity of interpretation

spectacle                     many               low                  high     shared entertainment

The assignment depends on the relative weight one puts on the two dimensions of number of alternatives and the distinction between them. In some cases the assignment of values is uncertain. Is boredom due to having too may alternatives or too few of them?

I was inclined to look positively on low entropy, since that is a sign of life, but if my assignment in the table is right, some less attractive things also are assigned low entropy: monopoly, authoritarionism and nationalism.

But instead of assigning approbation to high or to low entropy, the point probably is that most phenomena are combinations of them, alternating in time, cycling between one and the other as in life and death, and between stability and change, in interaction between objects and their environments, as shown in the previous item in this blog.

Perhaps war is needed to appreciate peace, autoritarianism to appreciate democracy, monopoly to appreciate competition, order to appreciate disorder, and vice versa.        

371. Entropy of markets

Concerning entropy in markets, economics is ambivalent. For the economist the essence of the market is competition, and in what the economist calls ‘perfect competition’ there are many alternative products with the same function, that can ‘substitute’, replace each other, and thus compete. That restricts profits and presses for efficiency, as a public good. Here, entropy is high, because there are many similar products.

On the other hand, there is innovation: novel products that sharply distinguish themselves from established ones. If the innovation is successful, it will push out established products, so that the total number decreases. For that reason, and because of its distinction, its ‘sticking out’, innovation decreases entropy. It is, so to speak, the life of the economy, as poetry is the life of language. And then, in due course, competitors appear who imitate the novelty, and entropy rises again.

When the market is ‘imperfect’, as in monopoly, competition stalls and entropy is low, here, not from yielding a unique new product, but from restricting the number of alternatives. It is the task of public ‘competition authorities’ to prevent that.

Now, will one still say that low entropy is the ‘life’ of the system? Or should one distinguish between the number of alternatives, in competition, as ‘good entropy’, and the unicity of one of them, in innovation, as ‘good negentropy’, and call only the latter the life of the system?

In my work, and in this blog, I presented a ‘cycle of discovery’. At one point of the cycle we have the situation of ‘consolidation’: a previous innovation has settled down, in its diffusion and imitation in the economy, yielding high entropy. To decrease entropy again, towards a new innovation, practice has to move to a new ‘selection environment’, in evolutionay terms, with different practices that the existing product is faced with. The crux of that is that it yields novel challenges of survival, pressure to change (necessity being ‘the mother of invention’). Also, the new environment, precisely where the old product fails, yields indications in what directions to change. This illustrates the need for variety for innovation to occur: novel information to expose inadequacies and new opportunities.
This initiates a set of further steps towards new negative entropy, in a new innovation, which then, after a while, moves on to a erosion of negative entropy, in diffusion, where entropy creeps in again. I discussed this in more detail in item 138 in this blog.  

In this way, the cycle becomes a cycle of high to low entropy, feeding on novelty from a new environment, and back again to high entropy, in the diffusion of novelty. It becomes a cycle of life, found also in natural life and death.

This cyclical process is an alternation of stability and change. Only stability would stifle life, but only flux would break it up. 

In a famous debate, in the 1950s, between Popper, Kuhn, Lakatos and Feyerabend, Popper, the champion of falsification as a criterion of science, had to admit that under empirical contradictions of a theory one should not instantly consider it falsified, because a certain conservatism, in ‘milking the theory for all it is worth’, even under an accumulation of anomalies, shows up ‘where the real limits of its validity lie’, and, I would add, gives indications of possible new contents and directions to develop a new theory.

So perhaps this is how the economy should also be seen: as an alternation of increase and decrease of entropy.

370. Entropy

Carlo Rovelli[i] proposed that much of the wondrous complexity of quantum physics can be captured with information theory (which isn’t really a theory, but a method). Here I consider whether that ‘theory’ might also help to understand humanity and society, and add to the dynamic ontology that I developed in preceding items in this blog. I begin with a brief explanation of information theory and the corresponding notion of ‘entropy’.

Information theory derived from thermodynamics, with its second law stating that when left alone, a system can only dissipate its energy: a hot thing dissipates its heat to its environment, and cannot by itself become hotter. The relevance to ‘my’ ontology is that this might contribute to understanding the central issue of how objects interact with their environment. States of nature decay from ‘order’, in the form of some specific, distinct configuration of elements, to decay in a ‘chaos’ of an undifferentiated mass. From information theory, that chaos is called ‘entropy’. In those terms, isolated systems increase in entropy.

In biology ‘life’ is characterized, defined even, as a system that resists the increase of entropy to maintain its negative, ‘negentropy’, to maintain itself, by ingesting new energy in the form of foods. Organs need to be maintained within a narrow range of states and boundaries of variation, in homeostasis. In death everything decays, dissipating into an undifferentiated mass.

Entropy is measured according to the formula:
          n

E = - Σ pi.logpi, where E = entropy, n is the number of possible states, pi is the probability of state i,
         1                  2
and log  is log at the base 2.
           2

From this follows that entropy can increase in two ways: an increase of the number of possible states (n) and the equalization of their probabilities (pi). See below for some examples:

n=2: p1= 1/2, p2= 1/2 à E= 1;                                 p1= 3/4, p2 = 1/4 à E= 0.8

n=3: p1= 1/3, p2= 1/3, p3= 1/3 à E= 1.6                 p1= 1/2, p2= 1/4, p3= 1/4 à E= 1.5            
n=4: p1= 1/4, p2= 1/4, p3= 1/4, p4= 1/4 à E= 2     p1= 1/4, p2=1/6, p3= 1/6, p4= 1/6 à E=1.8

Here, entropy (E) increases from top to bottom, with more states (n), and decreases from left to right, with more unequalities probabilities.

In quantum physics, discussed in the preceding item in this blog, in the Copenhagen interpretation a cloud of probabilties for the location of an elementary particle collapses into a specific location, in interaction with something in its environment. Then entropy is reduced to 0: one state with probability 1.

In the preceding item in this blog, I proposed something similar in language: a cloud of possible denotations of a universal (such as ‘chair’) collapses into a specific particular chair, in interaction with others words in a sentence. Uncertain denotation collapses into a certain one.

In this blog I proposed that understanding of language, and of corresponding thought, suffers from a ‘object bias’: the strong inclination to see universals in analogy to objects in Newtonian time and pace, similarly to the problem in understanding quantum theory. What does not fit in that perspective ‘is not real’.

In philosophy, this bias drove Plato to claim that a univesal has an unambiguous denotation in the form of an ‘ideal’ object, as the ‘real reality’: some unobservable that lies behind the shadows or imperfect manifestations that we can observe (in his famous metaphor of the cave).

So language use, according to the rules of grammar and syntax, reduces entropy and therefore is a sign of life.

But how about poetry, then?  That adds meanings to clouds, and connects clouds, in metaphor, seeing something in terms of something else, and thus appears to increase rather than decrease entropy, disturbing the order rather than creating it. Is poetry not to be seen as a ‘form of life’, then (as Wittgenstein called language)?

Remember that there are two ways to increase negentropy: reduce the number of possible states, here meanings, or increase their distinction, to make some meaning salient, ‘sticking out’, precisely because it does not satisfy the existing order. And that is what poetry does. Bureaucratic, ‘normal’ language reduces meanings to some norm and thereby increases entropy.  

---

[i] Carlo Rovelli, 2016, Reality is not what it seems, Penguin.  

369. In interaction ambiguity shrinks

I think that in present times one should try to have an ontology that also covers the wondrous world of quantum physics. What am I up against there? I am not sure. There are several interpretations of quantum theory that have long been at at odds with each other, and still are, with fundamentally different implications, each difficult to accept. This is not the place to discuss all that. Can I connect my ontology to any of those interpretations?

The central feature of that ontology is that objects of all kinds, including both material and abstract objects, have an inside (what is in it) and an outside (what it is in), and that they arise, change or vanish in interaction with objects in their environment. They cannot exist without that interaction. 

I do find something like that in the “Copenhagen interpretation” of quantum physics that has been the dominant interpretation for a long time. This concerns the duality of an elementary particle (electron, photon), as being both particle an wave, or “cloud” of probabilities of locations where the particle might be.

In the “Broglie-Bohm interpretation” particle and wave exist at the same time, but in the Copenhagen interpretation there is only a cloud, until it “collapses” into a single location, where the particle appears, upon interaction with an observer-measurer.
In the “Everett interpretation”, interaction does not yield collapse but, on the contrary, an combination of the waves of the interactors into a larger wave, which expands on and on in series of interactions, growing into a wave encompassing the whole world, resulting in an infinity of possible worlds, each with its own superwave.  

Now, in terms of my ontology, would the cloud-particle duality constitute the inside of that object?
The interesting point here is that it is interaction with something outside (the measurer) that changes the state of the object. That is particularly interesting to me since I have spent half my life in srudying interaction between people.

I can only see a possible connection with the Copenhagen interpretation with its cloud collapse, in language, concerning universals. Consider the notion of “chair”. It can denote (refer to) a specific chair, without ambiguity. But that is only one of many specific chairs that constitute the “particulars” of the universal. Thus, the meaning of the universal is indeterminate until it collapses into a specific denotation in a specific sentence in a specific action context. It is in interaction with other words, in a sentence, according to grammar and syntax, that universals are disambiguated, that the cloud of meaning collapses.

I would not know how this cloud could be seen as a wave. But then, in a lecture posted on YouTube, Carlo Rovelli claimed that in quantum physics the wave does not really exist either, but is no more than a way of coding past interactions.

Concerning universals, that makes sense. In my treatment of universals, in this blog, I proposed that the particulars are not merely contained in the universal, and do not “derive from it”, as some kind of “reflection” of a Platonic “ideal object”, but on the contrary feed, constitute the cloud of possible denotations, developed from interaction between people in using the word. So here also, instead of the cloud being a wave, it is a deposit of earlier interactions.

I used the example, in a newspaper, with a picture, of a man using a stuffed cow for a chair, and so this became an additional possibility for denotation, in the cloud. Walking past a pasture with cows, one might then point and say: “look what a beautiful chair”.

There still remains ambiguity, now concerning the sentence as a whole, in differences of interpretation and understanding between people. They also take part in the interaction.   

Quantum theory and language seem to share what earlier I called an “object bias”. The objects involved (elementary particles, words) are seen in terms of objects moving in Newtonian time and space, but they are not like that. Earlier, I used the example of “chair”. A particular chair does not change colour or drop it legs when moved from one room to another, but the universal “chair” does change its meaning from one sentence to another.

Is this of any use? The notion of wave collapse from quantum theory did trigger the idea of a cloud of meaning for universals, and disambiguation, shrinking the cloud to a specific denotation, as a result of interaction, between words in a sentence and participants in discourse. I leave it to the reader to find this interesting or not.