Entropy, Negentropy Bioentropy

Reference?

Introduction

-Bateson added context and reflexivity through feedback loops to the Ogden and Richards 'thought-word-meaning' Piercean semiotic triad.

-Cybernetics had forgrounded feedback - but had (via information theory - Weiner et al) reduced (truncated) the notion of meaning.

-Bateson's discussion of the logical categories of learning and communication (STEOM - re-read and annotate) distibuished the difference between the sign and the signal.

-Cybernetic signaling was a form of zero-learning, living systems were interpretive and engaged in several logical types of learning.

-Bioentropy led to an entirely new defintion of information - 'The difference that makes a difference'

-An ecological aesthetics fit for meta-dualsism - sufficiently objective to deal with the many disruptions in its own recursive relations, yet subjective and self reflexive in the manner of a creative epistemology.

-Drew his inspiration from the aesthetics of RG Collingwood.

1. Cybernetics

-Shannon/Weaver > Weiner. 'information was a constraint on the production of entropy in local systems' - Need to think this through...'production of entropy' is such a weird turn of phrase. Do I misunderstand entropy?? Production of disorder. It seems to me this is all about face....perhaps because it comes from thinking order as given and breaking down rather than from the persepctive of emergence.

Actually - no -I get it now - it needed the next clause - 'a sort of "negentropy" or local island in a sea of entropy'

1.4 Embodiment. (p2365 Entropy 2010, 12)

With regard to meaning and the embodiment of selfhood...'all communicative emodiment was relational, that the relational aspects of reciept of information were an important part of creation of contexts of communication.'

..'he believed meaning to be prospective, so that what counts are the outcomes of communication and the way in which communicative interplay expresses and idea about connections in relationships that are yet to be instituted'

Does this mean meaning is speculative? Is laughter speculative like this... non-informational prospecting for context...?? Look up STEOM on meaning.

Bateson concentrated on misperception of communicative pattern..

Some off the cuff thinking:

This is probably wasted now.... but I won't delete it...

Maybe there is something fundamental here - some difference in thinking about energy, information and emergence. Ordered system are energetic systems - systems full of potential. A charged battery, a dammed river. The flow of that potential marks an ever increaing disorder until there is no energy available to the system for organisation.

It is this energy that leads to instances of negentropic emergence and an increasingly uneven/lumpy distribution of organisation. Ecological order is actually a stabilisation in this uneven distribution of organisation - a modulation of the flow of entropy in the service of an ecological continuity. I called this negentropic emergence....but maybe - bioentropy is more appropriate because - there is no arguing with entropy just a surfing the entropic wave.

Why did I go with negentropy and then so heavily defend it against this modulation of entropic force as bioentropy? I resisted bio-entropy because it seemed too biocentric to understand the emergence of the bioorganic. That is to say this form of emergence is not exclusively and is prior to the bio-logical; the bio-logic is formed of a negetropic tendency - the bio-logic is a function of negentropic emergence.

The other point is that the negentropic isn't some other form of entropy - there is only one form of entropy. And its not countered by some other form - for me there is something quasi-religious in this determination to give entropy its appropriate status as divine source.... of course I mean divine as in....this is my defintion of divinity. There is no higher order than the tendency to disorder. There is an ethic (or something) central to this - a disavowel not only of remnant humanisms but rather a disavowel of any abstraction that would attempt to make (some-other and unnecessary) sense of a sea-tossed world. Entropy is god. All god's forms and creatures are negentropic - all emergent orders are functions of an uneven distribution of order/disorder which allows energy to form in recursive eddies of negentropic sustain. Somehow information is emergent. Information emerges spontaneously out of energetic and choatic disorder - and there is a possible problem here with information theory and the relation between organisation/disorganisation, information and energy. My unchecked intuition is that perhaps the definition of information as the 'difference that makes the difference' is communication. The question as to how information emerges would thus first be a question of how communication emerges - some bootstrapping potential of communication leads to the emergence of information as the basis for negentropic continuity/sustain.

The idea that information emerges out of a realised communicative potential makes information contextual - local. To which we might say 'of course' - but I'm ok with that - it feels like a sign I am not to far off track. We might be allowing Bateson's sense of meaning back into an emergent information - because here the genesis of communication is also the genesis of context in reflexivity/recursion. Perhaps it might be possible to argue that meaning even precedes information - this seems absurd and I'm not sure what I mean by this. Maybe that meaning is in the material affordance that constitutes information as order contextually. Need to think this through though. When we sense a communication breakdown - a loss of information, an increasing disorder it might be meaning that we intuitively hold onto and which allows us to remember and reconstitute information flows. This is the feeling of knowing something we don't know - of an affective drive to reconstitue communicaitons and reassert informatic stability.

It might also be that information and meaning are possibly, or sometimes, transductive in relation - mutual recursive continuities - this might be the meaning of Bateson's - 'ecological aesthetics fit for meta-dualism - sufficiently objective to deal with the many disruptions in its own recursive relations, yet subjective and self reflexive in the manner of a creative epistemology.'

That the negentropic emergence of information is local tells us much about its relation to the wider ecological 'order'. Negentropic continuity serves a global tedency to entropy. Entropy is god after all and we serve only god's will. Negentropic emergent-cies are energy sinks -they are little assemblages/orders that consume energy in the service of their continuity and at the expense of a global disorder. Entropy is inevitable.