Message-ID: <970207093641_-1777384215@emout14.mail.aol.com> Date: Fri, 7 Feb 1997 18:26:49 -0500 From: mailto:EUNSteve@AOL.COM> Subject: THEORY: "Knowledge is anti-entropic" To: mailto:DEVEL-L@AMERICAN.EDU
Let me back away from quarreling with Jay Hanson and attempt to explain to my colleagues here why I believe that the issue we have discussed is not merely academic windiness but gets to the heart of the positions we take on the rich and the poor, on science, technology, politics, education,economic systems. And, of course, on the way we approach our work as "developers".Clearly this is true: if The Law of Entropy is fixed and unalterable and determining, all of our attempts to find justice for the poor must be shaped by that Law.
The ill-starred prophet whose work, derided in his lifetime, provides the foundation for a different view of entropy is Ludwig Boltzmann. As late as 1980 Rifkin was asserting that Boltzmann's work had been totally repudiated by scientists and matematicians such as Poincare. His work is now widely accepted as the foundation of "information entropy" and "spacial entropy."
Here is a reference, known to many of you, that presents the new world picture emerging from quantum physics. It is George Gilder's 1989 book MICROCOSM, and its subtitle is significant for those of us interested in development: "The Quantum Revolution in Economics and Technology."
Here is a quote from that book. You will see its challenge to the materialist deterministic view of entropy as the prison in which we are enclosed.
"Gone is the view of a thermodynamic world economy, dominated by 'natural resources' being turned to entropy and waste by human extraction and use. Once seen as a physical system tending toward exhaustion and decline, the world economy has clearly emerged as an intellectual system driven by knowledge. The key fact of knowledge is that it is anti-entropic: it accumulates and compounds as it is used. Technological and scientific enterprise...dwarf the loss of resources and energy. . .To see the world primarily in terms of its waste products is possibly the most perverse vision in the history of science. The history of ideas cannot be comprehended as an enropic cycle of the production and disposal paper products."
So: there are those who characterize those who propagandize a physical entropy view of the world as "perverse." I do not think they are perverse: but they seem , often, unwilling or unable to entertain the possibility that quantum physics has changed not only our view of the world but our ability to live in it.
Gilder calls the earlier view "materialist superstition."
"The materialist superstition succumbs to an increasing recognition that the means of production in capitalism are not chiefly land, labor, and machines, present in all systems, but emancipated human intelligence. Capitalism--supremely the mind-centered system--finds the driving force of its growth is innovation and discovery. In the age of the microcosm, value added shifts rapidly from the extraction, movement, manipulation, exhaustion of mass to the creation accumulation of information and ideas."
I do not expect those here who have lived with other beliefs and ideologies for many years to drop those articles of faith and embrace this one. The animus here against capitalism, for example, is too deep and dark to yield to Socratic dialog. I ask them to consider seriously these views before they reject them, and to remember that Gilder, nonscientist and popularizer, speaks for a substantial segment of the respectable minds and voices in the communities of science, economics, technology.
And development.
Steve Eskow