I. I have a theory that human knowledge is analogically like the second law of thermodynamics and entropy. However, it is not that systems of human knowledge tend towards disorder or less knowledge, but instead towards more knowledge. This is not the entropy of Claude Shannon's information theory, in which there is a stochastic rate of loss in the transmission of information. It is rather a theory about how knowledge proliferates in closed social systems (at any scale). I begin by defining the second law of thermodynamics and entropy as I understand them and pointing out how certain parts of a system defy the law (local reversals) even though the system as a whole tends towards an increase in entropy. Next, I outline by analogy how I think a system structured like entropy occurs in systems of human knowledge. Finally, I close with some remarks on Charles Sanders Peirce, who ultimately sowed the seeds of this idea. If you understand entropy and thermodynamics already, you can skip to section three.
II. The way I draw out these concepts here will be gerrymandered a little in order to emphasise the analogical aspects it will end up having to my theory of knowledge. It is not intended as a good introduction or explanation of entropy, nor do I take any particular cosmological or metaphysical interpretation. However, it is what I am talking about here.
First of all, entropy. Entropy is the measure of disorder in a system. But what is disorder? I will give a highly simplified example that doesn't technically work but conveys the basic meaning quite well. Imagine you are living in a flatting situation with three others. It's Sunday, and you've just cleaned and tidied the fridge - everything is in its right place. Thus, there is the maximum level of order in the system (the fridge) and a minimum level of entropy. To do this, you've had to exert some energy external to the system (your effort to clean) into making it so. Now, assuming no one else cleans and tidies the fridge (as you may safely assume in a flat), the system can change in one of two ways over time. The first is that everything taken out is put back in the same way, leading to no change in entropy (this never happens in the real world). The second is that things are put back in a different, messy way, changing the state of the system. The latter change necessarily increases entropy because the maximally ordered initial state acquired after cleaning has been changed.
Thus, the flat fridge can be said to tend toward disorder because, absent some external force (you cleaning it), the only possible changes in its constitution is to either remain at the same level of entropy or for it to increase. Assuming there is a non-zero probability that changes will continue to occur within it that increase entropy (such is what happens in the flat), it will continue to increase indefinitely. Leave the system alone, and disorder will accumulate.
Next, the second law of thermodynamics. What I have outlined above, the idealised system of the flat fridge is an example of a 'closed system.' A closed system is an idealised or isolated set of variables for study that we take to be independent of the environment. For example, we could take the flat lounge and a glass with an ice cube to be a closed system for study. The second law of thermodynamics is a theory about what happens in closed systems like this. It states that these systems tend to degenerate towards a more disordered state, a state of higher entropy. We saw how that could happen above. However, disorder is a slightly misleading way of explaining entropy and what is happening in a thermodynamic system. Instead, the system returns to 'thermal equilibrium,' which is the maximum state of entropy. Thermal equilibrium is better described as the tendency of the temperature of a system to become more uniform over time (rather than its constituents becoming more disordered). All closed systems tend towards thermal uniformity.
For example, imagine a large tank with a divider in it. One half is full of hot water while the other is full of cold water. When you remove the divider (assuming it's an entirely closed system and no energy is lost), it will eventually reach a state of being warm and stay there indefinitely. It loses the maximally ordered sections of hot to cold and ends up in a completely 'disordered' soup, in the sense that you can discern no order. It is uniform. A thermodynamic system will do this because the possible changes of state within the organisation of the molecules can only either remain as the same ordered distribution of energy or become less (as noted earlier with the fridge). Part of the reason the system tends towards the equilibrium state is that the equilibrium state has the greatest set of 'microstates', possible organisational states of the system, than any other. Furthermore, since the decoupling of heat and cold is irreversible (since the system is closed and cannot be heated back up on one side), the system will always reach this point eventually. There are more possible microstates of higher entropy and thus a statistical guarantee that the system tends in one direction.
The law makes a lot of intuitive sense and can be transposed to explain innumerable processes. In the example of the flat lounge invoked earlier, the ice cube will melt into the water for the same reason over time. The thermal energy of the room spreads to the colder ice cube, thus eventually equalising temperatures between the two components of the system. The ice cube itself undergoes an increase in entropy, the room undergoes a slight decrease in entropy, but overall the system will have gone through a net increase. It does not take a scientist to think that this could apply to almost anything and that perhaps the entire universe is a closed system. It is, after all, by definition, one big system without an outside. This idea is how we got the thesis of the heat death of the universe, in which the universe reaches thermal equilibrium, a maximum state of entropy where no 'work' could be done, and the motion ceases. Scientists don't think this is a viable hypothesis anymore for empirical reasons that are not important, but it would follow if the universe were an ideal isolated thermodynamic system. Let us assume that it is for a second.
If we take all processes to be explained by this increase of entropy, humans seem to be a different kind of thing. Are we also such thermodynamic systems? On our assumption that the universe is a closed system, yes, but we are still a peculiar aspect of the system. We are what you might call 'local reversals' of the law. The universe still goes through a net increase in entropy over time and at any given state following the initial conditions, but there are local regions of the system, humans (and animals), that defy the macro law and are constant sources of a micro decrease of entropy. As Thoreau writes, "animal life, is nearly synonymous with the expression, animal heat; for while Food may be regarded as the Fuel which keeps the fire within us...shelter and clothing also serve only to retain the heat thus generated and absorbed...The grand necessity, then, for our bodies, is to keep warm, to keep the vital heat in us." That being said, we are still part of the system, and thus we are constantly fighting our eventual decay. In the course of our lives, eating, drinking, and taking shelter, we avoid our own heat death, until we do not. On these simplified assumptions, there will always be a continual increase of entropy and the consequent equalisation of energy. There are local reversals of law within a thermodynamic system, but the repeated interactions of highly entropic microstates eventually cancel them out.
III. Now, I could make an incredibly boring and terrible analogy between entropy and knowledge in a social system. It would go something like this. The 'ordered' state of a social system is the beginning of a system of knowledge, in which there are clear competing hypotheses (hot and cold). Over time, as more hypotheses become givens, get refuted, expanded on, developed, and connected with one another, the system becomes more uniform (becomes warm). The complete equalisation of thermal energy, maximum entropy, is the consensus of a social community around truths accepted. This analogy tells us nothing new or interesting. Nor does the analogy reveal anything not already said by the statement of the view itself. It merely restates a view relatively close to Popper or Kuhn on scientific consensus, with an added comparison. I want to do something else.
Rather than appealing to the weaker analogy between hypothesis giving and consensus, I would like to make a more potent analogy. The scheme will pair the analogy in something like as follows:
- Thermodynamic system = Social system
- Entropy = knowledge (in the system)
- The tendency towards disorder/uniformity (2nd Law) = The tendency towards the accumulation/proliferation of knowledge
- Thermal equilibrium = Absolute knowing
- Local reversals (Humans) = Local reversals (lies, deception, and error)
- Microstates of high entropy = Interactions producing net positive knowledge
Now I state the idea in full, incorporating the familiar form of the postulates of thermodynamics outined above, before explaining it:
The constitutive character of sociality is the transmission of human knowledge - there is a tendency towards the accumulation and proliferation of knowledge in social systems. Thus, absent some external force, the total knowledge in a (closed) social system tends to increase. It does this because there are more possible microstates of social interaction in which there is a higher quantity or spread of knowledge due to human nature, experience, and memory. While there are local reversals of this law (lies, deception, and error) within a social system, the repeated production of knowledgeable microstates always makes such reversals unstable, providing a statistical guarantee that the system will continue to tend in the direction of the accumulation of knowledge.
A closed social system or system of human knowledge means here any arbitrarily isolated group of individuals. For example, this could be you and your partner, you and those untidy flatmates, your family, the greater Wellington region, all of New Zealand, the Democratic Peoples Republic of North Korea, or the entire world. However you wish to draw up a social system, my theory predicts that the accumulation and proliferation of knowledge will eventually increase over time from the point indicated. Now there are many ingredients here, and I will have to defend each one of them in turn.
The first is the idea that the constitutive character of sociality is the transmission of knowledge. What do I mean by that? My thought here is that you cannot have social interactions without, in some sense, either accumulating or proliferating knowledge. Every time you interact with someone, you give them some new information (proliferating), and they give you some new information (accumulating). While most of what is said is banal and irrelevant in the immediate future (such as the weather for the next day), there is still an increase of knowledge in the system when such things are said, even if it is merely used as data for future prediction. However, a lot of it is not irrelevant. Take a couple, for example. Each time they have a conversation, as they live life together and have to solve problems together, they accumulate knowledge about the other's life. They come to know all of the information they need in order to navigate their lives, stay safe, live happily, circumvent problems together, such as how to raise children, how to deal with others and each other, the state of the political world as it affects them et cetera. Throughout their lives, the natural state of the social system is accumulation.
There are three mechanisms to this process as I see it. They are human nature, experience sampling, and memory. I obviously hesitate in appealing to human nature in any case because the analysis can always end up spurious. However, I will not need much out of the notion here. The human nature I am interested in is the simple fact that we, for the most part, sincerely communicate information about the environment and our mental states to others in order to co-operate. Imagine trying to go through life with no communication whatsoever or only ever attempting to deceive and lie. It would not only be psychologically impossible, but it would also be imprudent. You would probably end up dying, able to get no help from others! Try and go even a day without some sort of sincere or intentional communication of knowledge, and you cease to live.
Thus, the social transmission of knowledge seems to be the natural state of human affairs, if any. Moreover, its continued operation within a system means that the knowledge operative in a social system almost definitionally goes up, insofar as they can communicate. A corollary to this is that we are constantly correcting each other's errors. So even when we are wrong about things, we have a discursive community of agents constantly supplanting our states of ignorance with states of knowledge. We have to rely on the fact that this information is correct in a way, but our nature as sincere communicators of facts about the world guarantees this. This is the mechanism behind the proliferation of knowledge.
The second and third mechanisms are linked. I am calling experience sampling the process each member of any social system is constantly going through. They are experiencing a constant stream of data about the world delivered to them through the senses. The third mechanism, memory, is the mere fact that we retain this data. Experience sampling is the sole source of knowledge in a social system and makes up the content of communication with others. It is the raw data that discursive communities manipulate, interpret, and build theories or models out of in order to solidify an edifice of shared knowledge that they can predict and navigate the world out of. Take a straightforward example. You were outside a few hours ago, and it wasn't raining. A friend asks if you if it is raining outside, you say it is not. However, your other friend came in a minute ago, and it was raining. He corrects you, and now everyone knows it's raining because we trust that our communication is sincere. The form of this interaction generalises.
Thus, the process of weeding out error is the process of each member of the system receiving data from their environment, calibrating their comportment appropriately, and then sharing and adjusting their conclusions based on the testimony of their fellow experimenters. Experiencing sampling (and the agent's ability to recall it to others) is the foundation of all knowledge suffused throughout society, gathered in history, and reproduced by the fundamentally accumulative character of sociality. Of course, the specific content of the knowledge itself changes over time and according to socio-cultural needs, but unless you can wipe the memory of individuals in a system and burn their sacred books, once something is known, it is known for as long as they live and is passed on to the individuals they communicate with. This is the mechanism behind the accumulation of knowledge.
Therefore, if you leave a social system be, the natural long-run state of affairs will tend towards the proliferation (by communication) and accumulation (by experience sampling) of knowledge. Of course, there can be external forces imposed on a system, making this tendency void. For example, the couple from earlier could die in a car crash together, eliminating in one fell swoop the accumulation of knowledge. Similarly, nuclear holocaust could wipe out the human race, putting the tendency to an end for good. However, I leave cases like this aside for a moment to discuss less ruinous external forces.
In the same way that powering and sealing one's fridge to be colder, thus preventing its interior from returning to thermal equilibrium with its environment, makes the second law void in explaining the system's interior temperature alone, the systematic repression of knowledge production and circulation would make the analogous tendency void. For example, if somehow an entire social system were systematically deceived by some alien technology, my explanation would cease to be informative. However, like in the case of the fridge, going against these parallel tendencies requires a substantial stream of energy directed towards the effort, because otherwise the system naturally begins to equalise.
Let's take a less fanciful, real-world example. The Workers Party in North Korea attempts, at a national scale, to systematically deceive its citizens. They attempt to do this not just about party politics and the supremacy of their leader. They try to shape and control the outlook each individual has on the rest of the entire world. It goes without saying that this takes an enormous amount of energy to do. If North Korea weren't on life support gifted by China, who concede support only for strategic and ideological reasons, they would have collapsed. The insistence on the repression of knowledge and the mechanism I am proposing is the reason. They are in such a dire state because to prevent the flow of information, the constitutive character of sociality, while in a society, is a fool's errand.
The continued effort poured into fighting our natural tendency to accumulate and proliferate knowledge is the error and downfall of many authoritarian regimes, such as Stalinist Russia and East Germany. At the end of the day, hardly anyone is convinced by propaganda or blatant lies in a system of restricted information because it only takes one instance of experience sampling or trusted testimony of a friend (and a working memory) to falsify such deception. As I have noted, social systems are constantly bootstrapping themselves into elevated states of knowing. What really keeps people in line is the risk of death and dismemberment by the establishment. This explains why totalitarianism, attempting to control the flow of information in such a robust way, will always fail. (That is until they figure how to wipe people's memories wholesale!) Like the fridge, once North Korea is unplugged at the wall, it will collapse because it fights and expends its energy against the endless tide of knowledge accumulation.
(I think China can be exempted from an explanation like this because they have stopped trying to fight the Sisyphean battle of preventing the accumulation of knowledge at all (which is impossible to sustain). They instead only control the risk of expression of that knowledge (which is possible to sustain). People in China know a lot about the outside world and history, can travel abroad without the state stopping them, and they even choose to return, in a way that North Koreans don't even come close to. While they restrict the flow of information in substantial ways, their authoritarian success comes because people are still allowed, for the most part, to accumulate knowledge. They focus more on stacking the individual incentives such that each person under the regime risks too much by the transparent expression of that knowledge, thus making the totality of individual choices, ones that entrench existing institutions and consolidate power. Thus, rather than quashing the proliferation of knowledge itself (which would expend too much energy), they make it risky to express that knowledge by harshly punishing transgression and rewarding silence. They signify a new kind of authoritarianism that does not fight human nature as the repressive institutions of modern authoritarianism have in the last hundred years, but one that aligns itself with human nature by at once threatening and bribing us with what we really care about: life and limb. This is why I am absolutely sure that North Korea would have collapsed without external force, but I think that China will not.)
The final thing to discuss is local reversals within social systems and the statistical production of social microstates bearing net positive deliveries of knowledge. Just like we, as heat bearing sacks of meat, are local exceptions to the rule in terms of thermodynamics, lies, deception, and error are the local exceptions to the accumulation of knowledge. I have already discussed how error is naturally eliminated over time due to human nature tending to produce sincere discursive communities that eliminate it through experience sampling. I have also talked about lies and deception in a roundabout way by pointing to the unsustainable information ecosystem of North Korea. However, I want to go further than the weaker claim that these things are hard to sustain or merely require a lot of energy due to certain facts about our psychology. I want to say that there is a statistical necessity that social systems tend in a knowledgeable direction.
We can get the statistical necessity by thinking of any given interaction in a social system as a microstate of the system like we have in thermodynamics. Take an example of four people stuck on a desert island. Each interaction between each person has a much higher probability of being a net positive rather than a net negative interaction regarding knowledge. Most of the communication enacted will be information about food, shelter, survival, et cetera. Not only this, but if a member of the system does lie, it will not take much exploration of the island before someone samples its contrary, ousts the liar, and shames or threatens them into a commitment to sincerity. If something is said in error, it will not be long before one of their member's samples enough of the environment to amend and remodel the community knowledge base. This all works because there is an order of magnitude more possible interactions that lead to an increase rather than a decrease of knowledge. Because these interactions are happening at all times and without pause, there is a guarantee that this tendency remains intact at the macro level, always eventually subsuming the local reversals human hubris attempts to impose on this process.
Of course, certain microstates actualised could be a great leap backwards for any given social system. For example, the burning of the Library of Alexandria or the fall of the Roman Empire arguably led to a microstate in which the total knowledge in the system seemed to slide backwards on any plausible metric. However, what remains in both of these cases, as today is evidence of, is the fact that: the tendency to accumulation and proliferation of knowledge always remains. Even if some locally ruinous microstate was chanced upon, social systems always eventually transcend these conditions, and if recorded history has told us anything, it is this. I do not need there to be some actual end-state of absolute knowing that eventually will be reached, or that all knowledge gathered in history be gathered again, just that the tendency always remains.
Thus, while the direction and character of any given system of knowledge is indeterminate in the constellation of intermediary states it could take, it necessarily tends to become more powerful, and more far-reaching, due to the barrage of data to be accounted for in experience, and the ubiquitous and evolved social functions of cooperation. The human condition is not a merely contingent psychological tendency towards the satisfaction of historically mediated desire, but also a logical probabilistic tendency towards knowledge of the absolute totality of all things. I restate the idea in full, now hopefully making more sense:
The constitutive character of sociality is the transmission of human knowledge - there is a tendency towards the accumulation and proliferation of knowledge in social systems. Thus, absent some external force, the total knowledge in a (closed) social system tends to increase. It does this because there are more possible microstates of social interaction in which there is a higher quantity or spread of knowledge due to human nature, experience, and memory. While there are local reversals of this law (lies, deception, and error) within a social system, the repeated production of knowledgeable microstates always makes such reversals unstable, providing a statistical guarantee that the system will continue to tend in the direction of the accumulation of knowledge.
However, other possibilities could act as forces against this accumulation of knowledge. As I noted earlier, one could imagine a situation where every human is wiped out, and my theory becomes void. However, insofar as there is intelligent life that can reproduce, I don't see why an intelligent species the same or similar to us could not eventually come to the leading edge of knowledge production the way we seem to be. Assuming that our inquiry into the nature of the world is even remotely approximating reality, if another species does come about, there is good reason to think that, once evolved to a certain level of complexity, if they are even to survive, they would have to have the same sort of discursive capabilities and the individual-transcending ability for empowering their collective apprehension of the world that we do. There has been some speculation that there have been such species in the past and possibility will be in the future, and that each generation goes through a 'great filter,' for example. However, the only point I need to make is that if some species have any grasp whatsoever on the world in their evolved apparatus and can communicate with other members of their species, they can and necessarily will accumulate knowledge.
If anything like this is true it would seem to suggest that sceptics like Nietzsche and Kant are wrong to think that we are purely limited to our own ways of carving up the world. This idea of discursive communities bootstrapping beyond the knowledge of the immediate categories of perception, and the mere possibility that other species can do the same, suggests that we can transcend the purely subjective, even from the suppositions of cartesian scepticism and representationalism. I'm sure you could recapitulate this view to restrict it to idealism and discuss a human kind of knowing, but I think this would be the wrong move. The fact that our experience is of the world and that we are constantly transcending a single point of view indicates that we can and are constantly going beyond such restrictions, that our conceptual apparatus, even if it does not mirror the structure of the world itself (as Hegel seems to think), it does approximate or at least indicate it in some human way.
V. This view is not entirely new, however, I have never seen it fleshed out in the way that I have above. The germ of the idea came from Charles Sanders Peirce's famous papers on pragmatism, specifically 'The Fixation of Belief' and 'How to Make Our Ideas Clear.' Some of my remarks resemble some made by him in the last few pages of the latter. He has a certain view about the nature of inquiry where the answers offered to any given question will converge through the process of inquiry. He writes that
they may at first obtain different results, but as each perfects his method and his processes, the results will move steadily together toward a destined centre...Different minds may set out with the most antagonistic views, but the progress of investigation carries them by a force outside of themselves to one and the same conclusion. This activity of thought by which we are carried, not where we wish, but to a foreordained goal, is like the operation of destiny. No modification of the point of view taken, no selection of other facts for study, no natural bent of mind even, can enable a man to escape the predestinate opinion...The opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate, is what we mean by the truth, and the object represented in this opinion is the real...the opinion which would finally result from investigation does not depend on how anybody may actually think. But the reality of that which is real does depend on the real fact that investigation is destined to lead, at last, if continued long enough, to a belief in it.
I have my own views about what is real, so I disagree with him that the object of predestinate opinion is real (I don't think propositions or truth are real or are structured the same as reality). But I do think that the structure of inquiry leads to propositions that approximate and fit the contours of reality most snugly due to the discursive structure outlined above. I also agree that questions are in some sense answered by the world before they are found, in some in-principle verifiable way, but also that the answer is determined by the possibility of asking the question itself. He also mentions something that sounds like my local reversals and shrugs them off in the same way I do, by appealing to the tendency of the nature of inquiry and time:
Our perversity and that of others may indefinitely postpone the settlement of opinion [in a local reversal of inquiry]; it might even conceivably cause an arbitray proposition to be universally accepted as long as the human race should last. Yet even that would not change the nature of belief, which alone could be the result of investigation carried sufficiently far; and if, after the extinction of our race, another should arise with faculties and disposition for investigaiton, that true opinion must be the one which they would ultimately come to...it is unphilosophical to suppose that, with regard to any given question...investigation would not bring forth a solution of it, if it were carried far enough.
And he seems to agree about human nature; from The Fixation of Belief:
A man may go through life, systematically keeping out of view all that might cause a change in his opinions...But this method of fixing belief...will be unable to hold its ground in practice. The social impulse is against it. The man who adopts it will find that other men think differently from him, and it will be apt to occur to him, in some saner moment, that their opinions are quite as good as his own and this will shake his confidence in his belief. This conception, that another man's thought or sentiment may be equivalent to ones own, is a distinctly new step, and a highly important one. It arises from an impulse too strong in man to be suppressed, without danger of destroying the human species. Unless we make outsleves hermits, we shall necessarily, influence each other's opinions; so that the problem becomes how to fix belief, not in the individual merely, but in the community. (Emphasis mine.)
Overall we have many fundamental disagreements about metaphysics, but what we both agree about is that we have a right to be optimistic about inquiry. We both agree that the structure of inquiry is towards, if not truth, then reality. And that is something both he and I are sure of.
No comments:
Post a Comment