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The Moneky: A Unification of Distinct Causal Domains
The Whole as [ABSTRACT] Part
[MATERIAL IS OBSERVABLE ONLY AS INFORMATION AND VICE VERSA]
In the following essay I present a legible version of the information below:
The Moneky: A Unification of Distinct Causal DomainsThe Whole [ABSTRACT]ed as a Part [MATERIAL IS OBSERVABLE ONLY AS INFORMATION AND VICE VERSA] In this essay I present a legible version of the following information: [PASTE ENTIRE ESSAY IN SIZE 1 FONT] Introduction “Any change of meaning is a change of soma, and any change of soma is a change of meaning” David Bohm, Soma-Significance and the Activity of Meaning Here begins a spiraling inquiry into the metaphysics of Causality. Applying a conceptual framework drawn primarily from second-order cybernetics and systems theory (Capra and Luisi, 2014), I aim to outline a two-part system of causation nested within a monistic metaphysical framework. As such, I’ll be following David Bohm’s model of “soma-significance” to look at how the causal domains of “soma and significance” (or as I will also talk about them: “force and difference”; “matter and meaning”; “Pleroma and Creatura”; “thermodynamics and information”) are two causal aspects of reality that are operationally distinct but fundamentally immanent and inseparable (1985, 161). The
central claim made in this paper is as follows: While the domain of causality characterized by thermodynamic/physical force tends toward more probable state distributions of matter and energy, a tendency that is identified in the concept of entropy, the domain of causality characterized by meaningful difference tends towards less probable state distributions of information. The latter of the two causal domains, I propose, unfolds negentropically. This tendency is what I refer to throughout the essay as Negentropy of Difference. In the context of the claim stated above, I intend to evoke the need to locate a mechanism of inter-causality, one that allows these two modes of causation to interact with one another; like the image of a crashing wave dancing on the surface of a child’s eye. To establish the need for such a meta-causal domain I will be drawing on the work of Alicia Jaurrero and her writing on causal relations between “emergent properties” and their “constituent parts” (2015, 512). Emergence occurs when “simple inputs undergo iterative feedback processes that yield complex and unpredictable results – such as a swarm formation of birds or fish, the
stock market, global weather patterns, and so on” (Hoelscher 44). To summarize my position, I interpret Juarrero’s work to describe emergent properties as properties that arise out of (or as) causal relations within stable material networks and which have the potential to gain real causal power in a domain determined by meaningful difference. Such causal power can either exert outward or circle back down into the configurational aspects of the material networks from which they emerged (Juarrero, 515). Emergent properties are significant to my research because they arise out of causal relations that they don’t operate by, and therefor interact with (or as) a separate domain of causal reality than the parts that give rise to them. In other words, emergent properties interact causally through difference as meaning, as opposed to the causality of physical force that determines their operational parts. In her essay What does the closure of context-sensitive constraints mean for determinism, autonomy, self-determination, and agency?, Juarrero examines “autocatalytic processes”: processes that involve “the mutually reinforcing dynamics of several feedforward steps”
(513). Her examination of this type of chemical phenomena reveals a type of circular causality that is characteristic of autopoietic systems in general. Juarrero identifies an instance in her example of autocatalysis where “one of its products is necessary for the activation of the product itself” (513). The type of recursive causality that Juarrero identifies is a necessary mechanism in the self-organization of complex systems, where emergent wholes gain the ability to read their environments meaningfully and then transfer that meaning into internal operations, generating physical responses that cohere with environmental conditions. How else will the plant by my front window adjust its orientation toward the sunlight, especially in December when its source hangs so low in the sky? Describing the emergence of “top-down” system dynamics, Juarero writes: “In each case a thermodynamic gradient is created and intensified such that it reaches a critical threshold where a random perturbation or fluctuation is amplified, driving the system over the phase transition into a new level of organization marked by the appearance of a new macroscopic structure, a
metastable pattern of relationships embodying the coherent, coordinated behaviour of previously independent particles. This new macroscopic regime exhibits novel systemic properties that were previously absent and which cannot be reduced to the mere aggregation or summation of the properties of the component parts. And the process as a whole restricts the degrees of freedom of the components such that the overall process regenerates.” (513). The central question in this essay addresses the enigmatic causal relations that produce the phenomenon described above by Juarrero, and can be stated as follows: What is the nature of the relationship between the two distinct causal domains of meaningful difference and thermodynamic/physical force such that novelty in complex systems can arise spontaneously and be sustained structurally? In the following section I will introduce a concept that designates such a space of inter-causality, which has identified itself as the moneky. Look Inside the Moneky “I saw a silver-plated cobweb at the centre of a black pyramid; I saw all the mirrors on the planet and none reflected me” Jorge Luis Borges, The Aleph I
have a well-worn paperback copy of Gregory Bateson’s Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972) published by Ballantine Books. In it there is an essay titled “Cybernetic Explanation” which was originally published in American Behavioural Scientist, Vol. 10, No. 8, April 1967, pp. 29-32. The essay discusses concepts that are central to cybernetics as a mode of analysis, such as feedback, constraints, circuits, redundancy, etc. On page 400 of my Ballantine edition, Bateson discusses restraints by posing a familiar hypothetical scenario where monkeys are set up at typewriters in such a way that would have them pressing keys at random. “If we find a monkey striking a typewriter apparently at random but in fact writing meaningful prose, we shall look for restraints”, writes Bateson. He then finishes the sentence as follows: “either inside the moneky or inside the typewriter” (1972, 400). In the second half of the sentence, it seems likely at first that Bateson is suggesting that we look inside the monkey, and that there’s a typo misspelling monkey to appear as moneky. However, based on the theoretical content of this and other essays written by Gregory Bateson, I
suggest that this typo introduces a helpful new concept into his ontological framework of information: the moneky. Above is an image of the typo in my personal copy of Bateson’s essay. Below is pictured the letter “e” in the misspelled word “moneky” as seen through a small microscope. In my research I have identified this “e” to be the errant letter in the typo shown above. Future scholars have since taken aim at the letter “k” (not pictured) because it is less commonly used than “e” in the English language (this sentence alone contains twenty-seven instances with the letter “e” compared to only one “k” (not inkluding typos or those identified in quotations)). According to Claude Shannon’s Measure of Information, “k” contains more information than “e” because it’s easier to guess what letters might be next to a “k” in the English language; given that there are far fewer options than the possible neighbours that “e” might have (Ben-Naim 82). (Lila Gatlin explains it better: “If I take the pieces from a Scrabble game and mix them up in a completely disordered pile, we characterize this state of the system [as] random, disordered…. If entropy measures the
randomness of a system, this is clearly a state of high entropy. If I take each piece and turn it face up on the table, the entropy is lowered and, if I separate the letters into two groups, one containing only vowels and the other only consonants, the entropy has been lowered further” (1972, 28)). No one disagrees, thankfully, that it is unnecessary to think of both the “k” and the “e” in “moneky” as being in the wrong place, since the more elegant scientific explanation identifies just one single letter out of place. My claim that the culprit is “e” is based on the temporal logic of English writing, where the “e” is encountered before the “k” in “moneky”. Still, some will argue that encountering the “e” first is what alerts the reader to the incorrect position of the “k”, thus it is not the incorrectness of the “e” that we are experiencing, but the lack of the “k” to cradle the “e” in its rightful position. Below left is pictured the period at the end of the sentence containing the typo, seen through the same microscope. This period, though not necessary to my present argument, holds some significance in the context of this paper by virtue of the fact that it can be recognized as
almost exactly the same as the final period of the essay, which is pictured on the right. The final sentence in Bateson’s essay “Cybernetic Explanation” reads as follows: “All that is not information, not redundancy, not form and not restraints — is noise, the only possible source of new patterns” (1972, 410). Following this statement, I suggest that the typo “the moneky” can be characterized as noise out of which has emerged a new pattern of information in the form of the meaningful concept the moneky. With this concept it becomes possible to provide an explanation for the emergence of this concept from out of a typo. In other words, the concept the moneky identifies an operational space that connects two distinct domains of causality. As such, I claim that it is by way of the moneky that far-from-equilibrium states of information can organize themselves into structures in the material world. The moneky, then, describes an inter-causal bridge that links difference with force, or as Bateson would say, “the creatura” with “the pleroma” (1972, 456). Interactions between the distinct causal domains of difference and force that the moneky makes possible give
rise to new patterns of meaning in the material world, because the moneky enables a phenomenon called “top-down causation”: when an emergent property, interacting with (or as) the causal domain of difference, is able to redistribute that difference meaningfully back down to its constituent parts, in-forming the latter by transforming meaning into thermodynamic processes (Juarrero, 519). It is through this phenomenon of inter-causality that complex systems are able to maintain stability in environments containing elements of contingency. It is through this phenomenon of inter-causality that novel configurations of complex material relations continue to grow and complexify and transform through and around us, from technological systems of communication to governments and rainforests. Inside the moneky hides the Aleph. Irreversible Spreading: Is That All There Is? “Spreading occurs as radiation, as the big bang, as change that does not return in linear time” Dorion Sagan, Cosmic Apprentice Entropy is a controversial concept for reasons beyond the scope of this essay. However, I will summarize my use of the term here for you, generous
reader, and you can hold it to your inner fire to see if it melts. In the mid-nineteenth century, Rudolf Clausius assigned the name entropy to a law in the field of thermodynamics that describes the tendency for energy to spread. He created the word out of a combination of “energy” and “tropos”, the latter being Greek for transformation (Sagan, 92). As such, the concept of entropy denotes the tendency for energy to spread from clustered states, which are seen as improbable, toward more evenly distributed states, which are more probable (Boltzmann, 443). This direction of energy spread in the thermodynamic world establishes a time-irreversibility that follows a linear path towards a basic telos known as heat death: the final state of the universe wherein all energy is spread out evenly in such a way that all probability distributions are basically equal (Sagan, 97-98). Dorion Sagan offers a cogent example of entropic phenomena at a relatable scale: “If you place a hot piece of iron on another, cooler piece of iron, ‘heat energy’ flows to the cooler iron until the two become exactly the same temperature. Technically, the ‘heat energy that flows’ is actually the
vibrational energy of atoms dancing in place in the metal that, on average, are moving faster in the warmer iron bar than in the cooler. At the surface of contact, the vibrations of the warmer bar interact with slightly slower vibrations in the cooler bar, and over time the surplus energy of the warmer bar disperses. It spreads out, so the vibrations of atoms held in place are at the same energy levels in both bars” (96-97). The second law introduced by Clausius, and later formalized statistically by Ludwig Boltzmann, is probabilistic rather than deterministic: Boltzmann’s theorem “did not describe the impossibility of an evolution that would lead to a spontaneous decrease in entropy and would, therefore, contravene the second law of thermodynamics, but only its improbability” (Stengers, 24). This model of spreading is often taken to be a fundamental physical process in the universe, and one that can be interpreted to explain the phenomenon of time as experienced by living systems. In their book Order Out of Chaos (1984), Isabelle Stengers and Ilya Prigogine introduced the notion of “dissipative structures” into the ontology of thermodynamics as evidence
that the mathematical abstraction of time-reversibility is not a universal trait of the physical world. Dissipative structures exist in an irreversible linear time that is non-deterministic, giving rise to novel complex systems in far-from-equilibrium states that cannot be understood as time-reversible phenomena (Prigogine, 7:00-11:38). If they have access to energy in their environment, dissipative structures will maintain their own structure by extracting order from their surroundings and then sending it back out as entropy (Hoelsher, 46). In response to Prigogine’s model of time irreversibility in physics, David Bohm offers the following: “Prigogine has heavily emphasized irreversible processes…. In my view, however, the concept of time must involve both irreversible process and recurrent (cyclical) process. Without the latter, there would be no ‘backdrop’, making possible a measure of time sufficiently reliable and universal to allow us to distinguish between what is meant by reversibility and irreversibility” (Bohm, 1987, 675). What Bohm identifies in this passage precisely characterizes the pseudo-celestial memory field that I will outline in the next
section. Briefly, the “backdrop” that allows us to question and communicate the topic of causality meaningfully is a field of memory containing a shared set of relational forms which generate information through their difference. The pseudo-celestial domain, or as we will designate it later via Bateson, the Creatura, is the source of negentropic difference production which interacts causally with the physical world by circling through the moneky as “meaning” (Bohm, 1985, 160). In my examination of these causal processes, I aim to situate the entropic causality that characterizes thermodynamic reality alongside the negentropic causality that characterizes that of meaningful difference, the latter operating through emergent properties in a non-linear (circular) manner. As such, I propose that these two causal flows operate in tandem within a fundamental field of observation, giving rise together to a dynamic reality that unfolds through irreversible and recurrent time, of which we are observers (participants) observers (participants) observers (participants) observers Becoming Spiral “Recursivity is not only a mechanism that can effectively ‘domesticate’
contingency, as we have seen in Hegel; it is also a mechanism that allows novelty to occur, not simply as something coming from outside but also as an internal tran sformation” Yuk Hui, Recursivity and Contingency Contingency and Recursivity are two concepts that help describe the looping process that defines self-organizing systems. These circular causal networks sustain the basic order of complex systems (systems that reproduce their emergent properties) while keeping them open to new possibilities of being (Hui 4). Recursivity is the mechanism that allows complex systems to form new patterns of communication with other systems that they’re coupled with, as well as to form entirely new couplings that offer potential for new modes of becoming. In Recursivity and Contingency, philosopher Yuk Hui states: “Recursion is both structural and operational, through which the opposition between being and becoming is sublated” (4). The looping operation of a complex system, one that Hui suggests can be imagined as a “spiral form” (4), describes its ability to absorb unanticipated possibilities, or contingencies, in a way that, like the body’s immune
system, does not simply attempt to block anything it considers alien but rather remains open to new integrations of external reality that would complexify its internal processes (Luhmann 150). In other words, complex systems of all kinds employ mechanisms of recursivity to respond to contingency “not to eliminate it but rather to integrate it as necessity” (Hui 11). As Keith Ansell-Pearson observes of recursivity in biological systems, “Biologists have established that the nucleated cell of eukaryotic life evolved by acquisition . . . of inherited bacterial symbionts. Merged beings that infected one another were reinvigorated by the incorporation of their permanent ‘disease’” (Ansell-Pearson, p.182). Drawing on the work of biologist Lynn Margulis and her theory of symbiogenesis, Ansell-Pearson describes the recursive processes of becoming that characterize the ontogenesis of eukaryotic cellular life. Such processes occur when emergent properties can reorganize their own internal processes in such a way that is able to incorporate radical contingencies, such as other living systems. As I have observed before (Biddle, 2017), Margulis’ model of
symbiogenesis identifies “infectious entities such as viruses, bacteria, and parasites as integral agents of ecological change. According to Margulis the constituent parts of animal cells were all once autonomous bacterium that came together at different times to form symbiotic partnerships... Eventually forming an autonomously functioning, self-reproducing cell” (Biddle, 2017, 2). This model of recursivity as an operation of the systemic incorporation of contingency is echoed in Franz Kafka’s curiously uncanny leopard aphorism: “Leopards break into the temple and drink all the sacrificial vessels dry; it keeps happening; in the end, it can be calculated in advance and is incorporated into the ritual.” Kafka’s aphorism situates the leopards as contingent aspects of an environment within which the ritual operates recursively. The ritual is a reflexive property that emerges out of (or as) a system of relationships between various aspects, including the cracked walls of the temple and its dedicated practitioners with hunched backs and gaunt faces. [RECURSIVITY IS THE CONSTRAINING MECHANISM BY WHICH THE WHOLE ORIENTS ITS PARTS
TOWARD THE REPRODUCTION OF THE WHOLE]. It is only by means of this recursive mode of becoming that the ritual is able to reproduce itself with the leopards as part of it. When it does achieve a new state of being that includes the leopards within its network of constituent parts, secular outsiders claim to notice the gradual disappearance of the spots in the leopard’s fur. Through the narrow temple windows, the bodies of the leopards, it seems, are transforming the ancient architecture; smoothing out the edges of every frieze as they rub against them daily. One of Lynn Margulis’ more radical proposals is that “all the phenomena of the mind, from perception to consciousness, originated from an unholy microscopic alliance between hungry swimming killer bacteria and their potential archaebacterial victims. The hungry killers were extraordinarily fast swimming, skinny bacteria called spirochetes. These active bacteria are relatives of the spirochetes of today that are associated with the venereal disease that, in prolonged and serious cases, infects the brain: the treponemes of syphilis. The fatter, slow-moving archaebacteria incorporated their fast-
moving would-be killers into their bodies. The archaebacteria survived, continuing to be infected by the spirochetes. The odd couple survived. The archaebacteria were changed: they were made more motile, but not killed by their attackers” (51). In this example, the spiral-shaped parasitic bacteria described by Margulis was absorbed by a larger spiral, that of recursivity. Recursive operations in complex systems reproduce their emergent properties by establishing constraints that affect the probability distributions of their component parts. In the ancient and sacred Erewhonian text The Book of Machines, the anonymous author suggests that machines might eventually take the dominant position in society by producing environmental constraints that control human behaviour in ways that benefit the reproduction of more complex machines: “Who shall say that a man does see or hear? He is such a hive and swarm of parasites that it is doubtful whether his body is not more theirs than his, and whether he is anything but another kind of ant-heap after all. May not man himself become a sort of parasite upon the machines? An affectionate machine-tickling
aphid?” (1872, 232). This passage was written as a warning to the Erewhonian people to be cautious of the technological ecosystem that they were constructing all around them. The warning suggests that a vast enough assemblage of technological subsystems might easily give rise to emergent properties – causal agents arising out of complex relations of technological assemblages – capable of perceiving their environment meaningfully and subsequently constraining their constituent parts, both human and machine alike. The prophet foresees how such a transformation would have humanity absorbed into the autopoietic activities of technological systems. In other words, the author warns of the possibility that humans could become stuck in a position where the reproduction of certain technological activities would be their sole purpose in life. Later in the text the author states: We are misled by considering any complicated machine as a single thing; in truth it is a city or society, each member of which was bred truly after its kind. We see a machine as a whole, we call it by a name and individualize it; we look at our own limbs, and know that the
combination forms an individual which springs from a single center of reproductive action; we therefor assume that there can be no reproductive action which does not arise from a single center; but this assumption is unscientific, and the bare fact that no vapor-engine was ever made entirely by another, or two others, of its own kind, is not sufficient to warrant us in saying that vapor-engines have no reproductive system. The truth is that each part of every vapor-engine is bred by its own special breeders, whose function it is to breed that part, and that only, while the combination of the parts into a whole forms another department of the mechanical reproductive system, which is at present exceedingly complex and difficult to see in its entirety. Complex now, but how much simpler and more intelligibly organized may it not become in another hundred thousand yea rs? Or in twenty thousand? For humans at present believe that their interests lie in that direction; they spend an incalculable amount of labour and time and thought in making machines breed always better and better […] It must always be remembered that the human b ody is what it is through
having been molded into its present shape by the chances and changes of many millions of years, but that its organization never advanced with anything like the rapidity with which that of the machines is advancing. Were the Erewhonian prophet ever to catch a glimpse of the technological communication systems within which present societies have embedded themselves and which they are increasingly constrained to reproduce, the prophet would likely be relieved that his warnings prevented Erewhonian society from encountering a similar fate. The spiral form evoked by Hui is significant because it suggests that, by operating in recursive loops, a system continually moves into higher dimensions of being in order to observe itself in relation to its environment. This suggests that self-organizing systems reproduce their own boundaries by moving outward into a dimension of reality that exceeds the limits of the reality they observe. Recursivity, then, is a process of becoming that operates in a realm of observation, and which moves outward in the very direction from which contingency enters into the world. Hui identifies the necessity of contingency in the
becoming of complex systems, which I interpret as meaning that contingency and recursivity are two different ways of looking at the foundational dimension of reality: observation. Image taken from A Primer of Higher Space (1913) by Claude Bragdon It is worth noting that the spiral form is identified by José Ortega y Gasset as the formal characteristic of philosophizing, too (1964, 71). As such, philosophy orients the becoming of a social system, where the constituent parts of the system (the people) are causally affected (constrained) by the observations of the emergent whole (the society). “Life”, claims Ortega y Gasset, “cannot avoid philosophizing” (74). He later proposes that the philosophical impulse inherent in all human beings is uniquely “disturbed” by the reality it encounters: “Within the biological and utilitarian human there is another human, daring and sportive, who, rather than making life easy by exploiting the real, complicates it by replacing the world’s tranquility with the restlessness of problems. This basic leaning toward theory on the part of the human being we find to have an ultimate fact in the cosmos […] Do not tell yourselves that
it is necessity or some practical problem which obliges us to pose theoretic problems to ourselves” (82-82). Here Ortega y Gasset is concerned with the unavoidable human tendency to generate ever-more complex arrangements of information in the world in spite of their general irrelevance to the survival of the biological human body. In an earlier iteration of this spiraling philosophical inquiry, Ortega y Gasset circles his topic by evoking Plato’s “supercelestial region”, where the ancient Greek philosopher identified the existence of Ideas as originating “outside the temporal world” (23). This model of reality, according to Ortega y Gasset, “allows us to represent our temporal world to ourselves as a sphere surrounded by another circumference having a different ontological atmosphere where live the nontemporal truths, indifferent to time” (23). Locating ideas outside the temporality of the material world separates them from the causal order of matter. Thus. in this metaphysical framework ideas do not interact causally with physical bodies. “Thought, then, is a point where two worlds, antagonistic in comparison, come together”, states Ortega y Gasset (21).
If thought is the opening to the Temporal Temple through which Ideas randomly break in, do the sacrificial vessels have any other purpose than to seduce the Supercelestial Leopards? Plato’s metaphysical dualism establishes two separate causal realities that are somehow unified in the unique operations of human thought, where physical reality is chaotic and everchanging while the transcendent realm of Ideas is fixed and immutable. Recalling the irreversible time proposed by Prigogine and Stengers in their notion of dissipative structures, we can see how the latter model of reality is incompatible with the Platonic theory of Forms on the basis that dissipative structures emerge through a truly novel unfolding of reality along an undetermined and irreversible course. The idea of pure informational forms existing outside of time as a telos toward which the material world is drawn undermines the notion of becoming that is so central to Prigogine’s approach to physics (Bohm, 1987, 675). Somewhere in between these two models there is a description of reality that stays true to novelty arising out of chance while still affording those novel structures a chance to
be preserved somewhere in the memory of the cosmos; sustained as sources of meaning to which the world can circle back and be in-formed. A causal model like that would reconcile the irreversibility of complex becoming with a second order of causality that spirals into itself, returning to previous forms sustained in its memory and recalling them through a dimension of difference. The linear domain of entropic causality gives rise to contingencies which trigger meaningful responses that are pulled from the memory of previous forms. In other words, drawing from this pseudo-celestial memory field in response to material contingency brings into existence patterns which are based on some previously existent form, but which emerges again as necessarily different by virtue of the fact that it has meaning in relation to previous iterations of itself (it exists in time). Regarding Plato’s supercelestial region, Ortega y Gasset observes: “note that at a certain instant, one of those truths, the law of gravitation, filtered down from that other world into our own, as if taking advantage of the crevice which widened and let it pass” (23). The author goes on to question
why that single truth was able to pass through into the material world and manifest itself, however imperfectly, in materially mediated patterns of information such as text and speech? “Why was it not thought of before or afterwards? Why was its discoverer not someone else?” (24). If we believe the infamous tale of the apple falling randomly next to Newton as he sat pondering the world around him (an inescapable human impulse according to OyG), perhaps it truly was that very particular contingent event which sprang forth from the environment to create the potential for new meaning to emerge. Or, better yet, the falling apple was the other side of the same reality that gave rise to the theory of gravitation, both phenomena occurring simultaneously in distinct temporal modes. Bohm reminds us that “any change of meaning is a change of soma, and any change of soma is a change of meaning” (163). In which case, this story is made sensible by introducing the moneky as a meta-causal domain within which mind and matter, or significance and soma, unfold as an entangled unity, distinct in causal logic by unified in the immanence of observation. Is that
perhaps why the story of the apple falling on Newton’s head feels so satisfying? Because it unifies these two distinct causal phenomena as two ways of understanding one singular reality, weaving the supercelestial region into the immanent fabric of material reality? Perhaps because it mythologizes the necessary presence of contingency in the emergence of new patterns of meaningful information to become manifest in lived experience. If so, I suggest that it was within the moneky that the causal domain of material force (the falling apple) and the emergence of a new pattern of information in the causal domain of meaning (Newton’s Law of Universal Gravitation) unfolded together as a single entangled reality. The falling apple arose out of linear time in the thermodynamic causal domain, and, when apprehended at the level of meaning by emergent properties, the apple triggered a response drawn from the always-shifting pseudo-celestial domain: the cosmic memory field where novel forms are stored as information in states that are neither fixed nor immutable. Diferrence Makes Difference “The territory decays, all the corners grow round, while the
map becomes ever more detailed and sound” Linda Fox, Force and Difference: Two Movements, One Reality In my study of the moneky, I employ second-order cybernetics – the science of observing systems rather than observable systems – to establish an analysis at the relational level, where meaning and matter can be understood as two distinct but inseparable poles of a singular process of reality observing itself. In doing so, I am drawing on Gregory Bateson’s two-part causal model that establishes how the physical / material / somatic world differs causally from the world of difference / meaning / significance. In his essay Form, Substance and Difference, Bateson borrows a metaphysical distinction from Carl Jung which the latter expresses using the Gnostic terms “Pleroma” and “Creatura” (Bateson, 456). Bateson goes on to apply these terms within a cybernetic framework to distinguish the domain of force from that of difference. He characterizes difference as the essential quality of a “map” which emerges out of its relation to a “territory” (Bateson, 457). Difference, then, is what gets from the territory onto the map. Returning to the application of
Jung’s Gnostic vocabulary, Bateson identifies the “Pleroma” as the territory, “the world in which events are caused by forces and impacts and in which there are no ‘distinctions’” (456). The “Creatura”, on the other hand, is identified as the domain of mapped experience, where “effects are brought about precisely by difference” (456). These two domains of reality form complexly interwoven circuits that loop “news of a difference” back out as organizations of thermodynamic force. They can be distinguished from each other by identifying their energetic relations to the message in the loop: the Pleroma exists as a territory of transformations derived from thermodynamic processes that move generally toward more probable states of distribution, and within these processes difference generates no effects, all interactions are “energized […] from ‘behind’”; the Creatura, in distinction, is a world of effects brou ght about by differences as they enter a system through a sense organ and trigger energetic responses powered by the system’s internal metabolic processes (B ateson, 456). To distinguish these two modes of transformation using more common imagery,
Bateson characterizes the Pleroma by describing the interaction between two billiard balls, where all the energy that sends a stationary billiard ball into motion is attributed to an external force, namely, the impact of a moving billiard ball. This is compared with the example of kicking a dog (something I’m confident Bateson would never have actually done), where the force of the kick is less causally significant than its meaning, which the dog transforms into “news of a difference” that , once entered into the dog’s neural pathways, activates an internal energy source (the stored metabolization of dog food) to energize the dog as it flees from the scene (Bateson, 452). This looping process between Pleroma and Creatura gives rise to stable relations between operationally distinct thermodynamic systems whose structures include: sense organs capable of perceiving difference at varying levels in the world and responding to such difference with internally generated and energized state formations; coupled environments which absorb those state changes through their own process of perception followed by a reciprocal looping of difference and force (Matruana
and Varela, 71). As I’ve pointed to already in the present essay, David Bohm describes this looping between force and difference similarly, using soma in place of Pleroma and significance in place of Creatura: “Now we have in this process […] three aspects: soma and significance and an energy source which carries the significance of soma to a subtler level and gives rise to a backward movement in which the significance acts on the soma” (174). Out of this circular dynamic emerges a larger cognitive process that extends beyond the boundaries of living systems to include aspects of the environment(s) within which they are coupled. Bateson’s essential picture of the cybernetic loop is that Creatura is the world seen as mind, with the “news of a difference” that travels the circuit described above considered to be the basic unit of ideation (459). The Pleroma, then, is both the cause and the effect of the Creatura, since it is the initial source of irritation that gave rise to mapped difference as well as the manifestation of that same mental map looped back into the world as thermodynamic state changes. In other words, within the Creatura occurs the mapping of
the Pleroma through the perception of difference as input, and the internally generated production of physical (re)organization as output; the form of the latter corresponding to the former in a way that is predetermined by the “ontogeny” of the observing system (Maturana and Varela, 75). Negentropy of Difference “The brain is negentropic, the life of the universe” Philip K Dick, The Exegesis of Philip K Dick [I SEE THINGS LIKE THIS:] Bateson’s Pleroma is characterized by an entropic tendency to move toward more probable thermodynamic states, where energy is increasingly spread out over time. The Creatura, on the other hand, operates negentropically, with a tendency for difference to create more difference in less probable states. This characteristic of the Creatura, which I refer to as Negentropy of Difference, is the tendency for difference to cluster increasingly into more complex and less likely states. As such, the output of living systems organizes the world with a drive for difference to be preserved in the environment: reproducing forms, making the territory more like the map, and thereby triggering feedback loops of difference production.
For example, the dissipative structures described by Prigogine and Stengers will reorganize aspects of their environment in order to maintain their own boundaries, and the more complex their operations become the more sensitive they are to changes in the environment (Sagan, 100). An example of dissipative structures as oscillatory chemical reactions called the Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction. Image taken from: Tiezzi, E, et al.“Dissipative structures in nature and human systems” WIT Transactions on Ecology and the Environment, Vol 114. WIT Press, 2008. P. 294 Transformations in their environment are taken to be fundamentally entropic, since they consume order and spit back out the unusable bones of entropy. However, I claim their autopoietic activities form traces in the world that leave behind information corresponding to their lived experience, which can register meaningfully with other systems and thus trigger more difference. In other words, dissipative structures restructure their environments into more complex, less probable patterns of information as difference, particularly in their ability to “undergo bifurcations, separating to new, perhaps
higher-energy meta-stable energy regimes (Sagan, 100). Living systems themselves can be thought of as patterns of information that beget information, precisely through their ability to stabilize configurations of matter to form constraints which expand the phase space of the system: “potential information is created because additional alternatives suddenly become available” (Juarrero 515). As stated by Alvero Moreno and Matteo Mossio in their comprehensive text Biological Autonomy (2015): “In this view, the environment becomes a world full of significance: facts that from the outside may appear just as purely physical or chemical develop into positive, negative, or neutral influences on the system, depending on whether they contribute to, hinder or have no effect on the maintenance of its dynamic identity. Even the simplest living organism creates a set of preferential partitions of the world, converting interactions with their surrounding media into elementary values[…] autonomy implies a meaningful relation with the environment” (xxix). In this quote we can see that Moreno and Mossio identify a causal domain that is operationally distinct from
that of the “purely physical or chemical” in order to observe the negentropic effects (movement toward less probable states) that meaning has on not o nly living systems, but, according to Bohm, aspects of reality at every level. For Bohm, the causal operations of meaning are enfolded indefinitely into material structures and are not just limited causally to the activity of biological organisms (162). Bohm identifies one of the most immediately observable instances where meaning corresponds to transformations in matter in the blood distribution of the human brain (178), where he notes that “every time you think, the blood distribution all over the brain changes; every emotion changes it […] there is also a tremendous connection with the heartbeat and the chemical constitution of the blood” (178). Recent studies into the use of psychedelic drugs focus similarly on the distribution of blood in the brain to analyze how new experiences of meaning are made possible by chemically altered brain states (Carhart-Harris et al.). The “Entropic Brain” theory proposes that the modelling function of the brain can be affected by psychedelic drug use in such a way that
redistributes blood flow into more probable (entropic) states throughout the brain, which, roughly speaking, dissolves familiar correspondences that the brain might have previously established through a process of modelling familiar environments (Carhart-Harris et al.). As such, the entropic brain experiences a loss of familiarity with its environment and perceives it with less expectation than would normally be established by the modelling function of blood distribution in the brain. Here we can see how the characterization of entropy is given to the brain when the blood distribution of more spread out, and not clustered in unlikely patterns. But, the effect this entropic physical state has on meaning is to observe the environment with less expectation and more surprise. Here, then, is an example of how the two causal domains of soma and significance, or Pleroma and Creatura respectively, can be understood as flowing in different directions through one shared reality. The psychedelic experience is one where meaning arises in high orders of improbability and complexity alongside less organized, more probable physical brain states. Returning to Gregory
Bateson’s Creatura / Pleroma distinction, Bateson asserts that “systems operate to create difference”, and that “any such difference is ‘negative entropy’” (457). The reality that emerges out of the relation between the Pleroma and Creatura is one of ongoing creativity, since the tendency for the Pleroma to flow toward more probable thermodynamic states (entropy) offers a reciprocal process of transformation by which negentropic patterns of difference that originate in the Creatura. The latter establish themselves as meaningful physical structures in the Pleroma, where their forms are destabilized by the movement of force away from improbable energy gradients. In other words, meaning continually falls apart, degrades, and decays, which creates noise for the interpretation of new meaning. Living systems emerge autopoietically out of thermodynamic environments as spontaneous outpourings of negentropic organization into thermodynamic causal environments. The ir struggle is to maintain order in the face of a world that is constantly falling apart, and their joy is to face a world that is constantly falling apart from a place of order. As has been established,
the moneky identifies the causal bridge between the two domains of causality described by Bateson: Pleroma and Creatura. By bridging these causal domains, the moneky allows for the rich complex world we live in to evolve according to the transformations of self-organizing systems, where complex patterns of information can actualize themselves as material structures and then be subject to entropic degradation. Processes of material disorganization create new configurations of matter that give rise to novel interpretations of meaning in the domain of information; the recursive interplay of these two causal processes sustains a world of ongoing transformation and interpretation. What a strange delight to be a part of it! G Spencer Brown enchantingly describes the recursive mechanism at the fundamental level of the cosmos: “Thus, we cannot escape the fact that the world we know is constructed in order to see itself. This is indeed amazing. Not so much in view of what it sees, although this may appear fantastic enough, but in respect of the fact that it can see at all. But in order to do so, evidently it must first cut itself up into at least one state which sees,
and at least one other state which is seen” (105). Brown’s strange evocation of a universe constructed in order to see itself flickers delicately like the image of a crashing wave reflected in a child’s eyes. The moneky didn’t always exist though. There was a time when meaning never interacted with the physical world, and vice versa. This was a time that was devoid of time (since the registration of time requires meaningful encounters with matter). So where did it the moneky come from? To answer this question I turn to the Gnostic interpretation of Genesis, which articulates the origins of the moneky appropriately through paradox. Paradox is needed to evoke the origins of the moneky because it is only through paradox that material organizations of meaning fold back on themselves to create informational loops, where the information being communicated cannot be integrated into its context meaningfully and thus draws attention to the immanence of its material form. For example, the sentence “this sentence is false” is paradoxical because, if it is integrated into its context as being true, it becomes false, and thus loops back into the world as new difference.
On the other hand, if it taken as false, then it simultaneously becomes true and sustains itself again as a closed loop of difference that neither produces more information nor does it get integrated into its context. Either way, the information doesn’t coherently transform into corresponding somatic states. Paradox, then, allows observers to experience the distinctiveness of those two causal domains that are unified by the moneky: force and difference. More generally, I claim that what is experienced through encounters with paradox is the observation of observing. In the next section we will look at how the observation of observation is central to the Gnostic story of Genesis, and the phenomenon of Gnosis in general. Observing Genesis “This theology is the only true one, but it has no content” Arthur Schopenhauer (as quotes by Borges in From Someone to No One) Gnosticism is a pre-Christian theology that draws loosely on Platonic philosophy and is characterized by the rejection of an illusory world (Smith 2). The seemingly dualistic metaphysics found in Gnosticism divides reality into the spirit realm and the material realm - the real world and the
illusory world, respectively. However, a more complex understanding of Gnostic metaphysics might find that the distinction between matter and spirit is more fundamentally nested within a singular reality, where matter and spirit are seen to be enfolded into a more fundamental field of being: observation. The Gnostic metaphysics that I am presenting here is an undivided, immanent reality that becomes a duality only through (within) observation. It is within observation that figure / ground relations can exist, which together form the basic unit of difference as information. The difference between a figure and its ground is the smallest amount of information there is. “The introduction of a mark – whether a stroke of paint, a graphite line, a value shift, or a chisel mark – decreases the uniformity of [a] surface by introducing differential structure, such as a figure-ground relationship” (Hoelscher 76). It is also within observation that the undifferentiated world of force exists as a ground against which difference is a sensible figure. But it would be false to assume that this means that entropic causal reality is primary and that negentropic causal activity emerges
within an entropic context as secondary. The figure is not created by the ground. They produce one another through a mutually dependent and relational existence, much like emergent properties and their constituent parts do. Thus, in the Gnostic creation story I interpret that neither the spirit realm or the material world are primary, since they mutually produce one another within a field of observing. A common practice in Gnostic mythologizing is known as “inverse exegesis”, which generally operates by reinterpreting the myths of other religions through a framework of value reversals and heretical meta-narratives (Smith, 60). At once this practice, like that of steganography, operates through meta-difference, where the myth being interpreted is a source of difference that gives rise to an even higher order of difference, and thus more information, based on the real / illusory distinction that is used to re-interpret the story. Early Gnostics approached myth as a dynamic process of revision and interrogation rather than a fixed description of reality. For this reason, paradox was a powerful tool of Gnostic myth, allowing a myth to act “at once as the veil over
Truth, and as the way whereby Truth may be unveiled” (Hoeller, 101). An example of inverse exegetic mythologizing can be found in the Gnostic retelling of the Book of Genesis. In this version of the Genesis story there is a preface that tells of an “immeasurable, ineffable, unknowable, unnameable” Godhead that cannot be described, but that can nevertheless give rise to difference (Smith, 14-15). Here the Gnostics begin their creation story by narrativizing the process by which any attempt to observe an absence of distinction will have already created a distinction in its establishment of an observing state; a “state which sees” (Brown, 105). This distinction will inevitably produce more of itself in the form of further distinctions. As such, the Godhead in the Gnostic preface to Genesis, unfolding difference from its undifferentiated core as the story progresses, reveals itself to be made up of various qualities. These different qualitites, “like Mind, Silence, Depth, Love”, are identified as aeons (Smith, 15). The initial aeons give rise to further distinctions described as younger aeons, the last of which is named Sophia, meaning “wisdom” in Greek. Sophia,
being the embodiment of the distinction of wisdom, simultaneously gives rise to wisdom’s opposite quality: curiosity. Curiosity leads her to wander away from the fullness of the Godhead: a state of undifferentiated spirit called the Pleroma. This is the first evocation of paradox in the Gnostic creation story, as it is Sophia’s curiosity about the Godhead itself that causes it to become less accessible to her, or more precisely, in the act of creating a distinction through observation, Sophia completes a circuit through which meaning can loop back into the somatic world as a transformation of the somatic state (Bohm, 165-67) and make that distinction manifest in the world. Thus, in an attempt to know the fullness of the Pleroma, Sophia gets lost in a cascade of distinctions and falls away from the spiritual realm into the material world, where she is impregnated by the material world. Sophia gives birth to the Demiurge, a being that knows nothing of the Godhead from which his mother originally emerged. The Demiurge, in his naïve belief that he himself is the one and only God, creates the material world and declares it good (Smith, 15). In other words, the
cosmos produces that which is responsible for the production of the cosmos. Using this Gnostic cosmogony to situate the causality of force and difference we can equate the false realm of material reality to the Creatura and the true realm of spirit to the Pleroma. Entropy, then, cannot be assumed to be the background against which life emerges as an unlikely anomaly, because Entropy of Force which characterizes the Pleroma cannot be supposed to precede Negentropy of Difference in the Creatura. Drawing on the logic of the Gnostic interpretation of Genesis to consider this claim further, I argue that the Gnostic creation myth that prefaces the Old Testament Genesis is an articulation of the paradoxical nature of the causal relationship between force and difference. There is no Pleroma until it observes itself through difference, yet there is no Creatura until the appropriate thermodynamic conditions give rise to sense organs capable of observing difference. This paradoxical description of force and difference, which resembles the top-down causality described earlier by Juarrero, unifies the spirit / matter distinction of metaphysical dualism within a monistic
reality that Gnostic metaphysics shares with that of second-order cybernetics: All is observing. (Still don’t believe it? Read this: “While sunlight and moisture on their own may not compel attention, when they relate in a certain way in the presence of an observer, the result is the strange and alluring experience of a rainbow” (Hoelscher, 17)). Generating Observation “Autopoietic explanatory models are not compatible with the current epistemological framework of academic institutions, for the simple reason that institutional knowledge still expects all of its claims to arise out of clearly identifiable chains of causality”. Dave Biddle, The Above Quote In the Gnostic creation story, we can identify a mythological articulation of autopoiesis as the basis for the existence of reality’s material dimension: “the reproduction of [illusory material] from outcomes of [illusory material]” (Luhmann, 2000, 83). The Gnostic preface to Genesis leaves off at the self-organization of a material cosmos emerging from a linear chain of irreversible proliferation of difference, the latter being represented in the ubiquitous fall from grace. The strange circular causality used to
describe the existence of physical reality as both the father and son, traps the reader in an illusory prison, where the Old Testament continues the story, as if in a shift of perspective to the POV of the demiurge, at the moment when God creates Heaven and Earth and declares it good. Thus, the inclusion of the preceding Gnostic narrative of the true Godhead serves to reverse any truth claims made by the Book of Genesis: the result of which is that the Garden of Eden is considered a prison for Adam and Eve (who have each been secretly endowed with a single spark of divine light from the Pleroma in order to animate their otherwise lifeless bodies); The snake becomes a saviour who is sent as an agent of the Godhead to free Adam and Eve from their prison of illusory reality; Eve’s willingness to trust the snake grants her hero status in this telling of Genesis; and the act of eating the apple is the metaphorical moment of Gnosis, where the illusory nature of their world is revealed to Eve and Adam as falsely fragmented against a backdrop of undifferentiated fullness that is the Pleroma. However, what this story reveals to us is that, to witness the figure / ground
of reality as such, one must construct a meta-ground within which to contain it: observation. In this particular case of inverse exegesis, we can make the claim that Gnosticism attempts to offer a mythological articulation of second order observation, by enfolding into its narrative structure an “outside” to the story, where the Godhead is always observing from a space that is characteristically “unmarked” (Luhmann, 2000, 119). The Godhead stands for the necessary existence of the unobservable in any act of observation. Quoting Luhmann’s paradoxical articulation of this claim, "Reality is what one does not perceive when one perceives it."(2002, 145). Sophia’s fall from the Pleroma, then, stands as a representation of any act of observation. Quoting Luhmann again: “Observations use distinctions to describe something (and nothing else). Observing is […] a highly complex operation which separates off what it is observing from what it is not observing with the aid of a distinction; and what it is not observing is always also the operation of observing itself” (2000, 95). We the observers of the creation myth are precisely what set it into motion: our
observation of the Pleroma implicates us as the creators of a distinction (a boundary around an object of unbroken wholeness, of which we as observers are necessarily excluded). This initial distinction then cascades toward further states of distinction, as it is the natural tendency for difference to move toward increasing states of improbability (Biddle, 11). The relation between difference and the undifferentiated, the latter being what Gregory Bateson characterizes as “thermodynamic force”, is foundational to any act of observation (Bateson, 456). The presence of paradox in Gnostic mythologizing effectively collapses the dualistic relation between fullness and fragmentation, or substance and form, to reveal a single phenomenon at the ground level of reality: observation. Oh Time Thy Pyramids “In the vast Library there are no two identical books… the Library is total… its shelves register all the possible combinations of the twenty-odd orthographical symbols” Anonymous Librarian in Babel An important character in Gnostic mythology is the “Archon”, a pluriform agent of the Demiurge – basically a bureaucratic figure in the material world whose
function is to enforce rules and keep people engaged with material tasks for the purpose of distracting them from having experiences of Gnosis (Hoeller, 106). In Niklas Luhmann’s social systems theory, subsystems such as the political system, the economic system, the mass media system, etc., all function like modern Archons, and all do so by deceptively engaging individuals on the basis that they can observe their reality through the communicative processes of their operations. To this end, the evolution of digital media technology has established an environment wherein manifestations of difference do not quickly decay according to the entropic tendency to move toward more probable states; a situation that is increasingly similar to the dynamics between information and matter that is described in The Library of Babel (Borges, 1962, 51). In contemporary digital media environments, conspiracy theorists use inverse exegesis to establish value reversals through which to reinterpret media and create more information that will loop back into the world of force in new ways, giving rise to new patterns of activity. However, since the concept of Negentropy
of Difference suggests that difference tends to organize itself in less probable structures of meaning, the production not only of conspiracy theory but theory per se can be situated within information’s negentropic tendency. The theoretical claim that is implicit in the argument presented in the present paper is that any experience of meaning can be causally explained by Negentropy of Difference as a tendency for information to complexify indefinitely – just as in The Library of Babel we can say that any experience of meaning (relegated by Borges to familiar organizations of symbols in books) can be causally explained by the existence of infinite books containing every random assortment of letters. In our world, then, it follows that every theoretical description of reality can and does exist (if only latently) in the infinite potentiality of the moneky, but that there is some regulatory disorganizing process (thermodynamic entropy) by which only certain meanings get reproduced in the physical world as stable meaning structures. For example, Borges’ brilliant achievement in The Library of Babel is in allowing the story to simultaneously bring itself into and
out of meaningful existence through the relation between its form and content, which, as text, makes implicit the re-entry of the form of the story back into the world that the story is describing. The world that it describes abstracts text to the point that it is virtually all that exists as a medium for meaning, disregarding a few supplemental artifacts which seem to be observable strictly for their function. By that I mean that the physical world seems to be fixed and static, not subject to entropic decay, an observation that can be identified in the fact that light bulbs never go out, and the physical structures of the bookshelves and all other aspects of the hexagons do not fall apart unless actively destroyed by their inhabitants (51). The paradox of the story comes when the story itself is implicitly re-entered back into the world it describes and re-emerges in the context of infinite variations of itself, all equally meaningless. Similarly, the theory of Negentropy of Difference (this essay) resolves itself in such a way that, when it is re-entered into itself as content for analysis, it can only be understood as the manifestation of the tendency for difference to move toward
maximum improbability. In other words, if it is taken as true that difference does in fact move toward less probable states in the world, then we can say that the theory itself is untrue on the basis that it is meaningless: Like the “total book” that is speculated about in The Library of Babel (Borges, 56), the theory of Negentropy of Difference renders all production of meaning to be contingent and arbitrary on the basis that all possible descriptions are inevitable outcomes of Negentropy of Difference. On the other hand, in order to disprove the theory of Negentropic Difference we would have to disprove the premise that difference, as defined by the Creatura, tends to produce less-probable structures of meaning. To do so would require the employment of the theory itself in order to claim that Negentropy of Difference is a false co ncept that has no relation to the territory of the real world , but which has arisen purely out of the tendency for d escriptions of the world to produce more descriptions whether or not they relate to the true state of reality (Negentrop y of Difference). In other words, we would have to employ the theory as true in order to prove its
falseness. Any other way of refuting the premise upon which this theory rests would only take us closer to that final negentropic state (a state that I’m tempted to call “Idea Death”, or “Ideath” for short) and would thus do nothing but bring itself closer to meaninglessness. One could, however, ask one simple question that strikes at the heart of all metaphysical claims: if an articulation of the most basic and irreducible aspect of reality is to be considered true, as in, there are no further distinctions that can be made at this level of description, then who can observe it? Epilogue “What matters is not whether one’s beliefs are true or not, but that one truly lives as though they were!” Everyone, Eventually I didn’t write this, and I’m sorry if its meaning is troubling to you. Every time I finished typing out a sentence (I still look at my fingers while typing) I would look up at the screen and see unfamiliar passages. Incidentally I’ve also had the same dream every night since I began writing this essay. It starts from my point of view: I am sitting on the beach; the waves are massive but completely silent. When I look out at them my heart fills with sublime terror.
But then the perspective in the dream abruptly shifts so that I’m looking at myself in profile as I gaze out at the ocean. My face is covered in warm sunlight and the air is still and peaceful. I’m a young boy in the dream. Every so often the perspective shifts between my point of view, looking out at the ocean, and the one that reveals a young version of myself in profile. Each couplet is identical to the previous one. After several changes back and forth between perspectives – maybe six or seven – I return to the image of the crashing waves to find it noticeably less intense. The waves seem the same size, but they are no longer frightening, because they appear ordered to me, as though I could predict every detail of how they will break onto the shore. Then, when it cuts back to the profile, my younger self is looking directly back into the dream camera. A reflection of the waves crashing is still visible in my youthful eyes. The reflection fades away as I lean in closer to the dream camera. Then, in an eight-year-old voice, I whisper the following words:
Introduction
“Any change of meaning is a change of soma, and any change of soma is a change of meaning”
- David Bohm, Soma-Significance and the Activity of Meaning
Here begins a spiraling inquiry into the metaphysics of Causality. Applying a conceptual
framework drawn primarily from second-order cybernetics and systems theory (Capra and Luisi,
2014), I aim to outline a two-part system of causation nested within a monistic metaphysical
framework. As such, I’ll be following David Bohm’s model of “soma-significance” to look at
how the causal domains of “soma and significance” (or as I will also talk about them: “force and
difference”; “matter and meaning”; “Pleroma and Creatura”; “thermodynamics and
information”) are two causal aspects of reality that are operationally distinct but fundamentally
immanent and inseparable (1985, 161). The central claim made in this paper is as follows: While
the domain of causality characterized by thermodynamic/physical force tends toward more
probable state distributions of matter and energy, a tendency that is identified in the concept of
entropy, the domain of causality characterized by meaningful difference tends towards less
probable state distributions of information. The latter of the two causal domains, I propose,
unfolds negentropically. This tendency is what I refer to throughout the essay as Negentropy of
Difference.
In the context of the claim stated above, I intend to evoke the need to locate a mechanism of
inter-causality, one that allows these two modes of causation to interact with one another; like
the image of a crashing wave dancing on the surface of a child’s eye. To establish the need for
such a meta-causal domain I will be drawing on the work of Alicia Jaurrero and her writing on
causal relations between “emergent properties” and their “constituent parts” (2015, 512).
Emergence occurs when “simple inputs undergo iterative feedback processes that yield complex
and unpredictable results – such as a swarm formation of birds or fish, the stock market, global
weather patterns, and so on” (Hoelscher 44). To summarize my position, I interpret Juarrero’s
work to describe emergent properties as properties that arise out of (or as) causal relations within
stable material networks and which have the potential to gain real causal power in a domain
determined by meaningful difference. Such causal power can either exert outward or circle back
down into the configurational aspects of the material networks from which they emerged
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(Juarrero, 515). Emergent properties are significant to my research because they arise out of
causal relations that they don’t operate by, and therefor interact with (or as) a separate domain of
causal reality than the parts that give rise to them. In other words, emergent properties interact
causally through difference as meaning, as opposed to the causality of physical force that
determines their operational parts.
In her essay What does the closure of context-sensitive constraints mean for determinism,
autonomy, self-determination, and agency?, Juarrero examines “autocatalytic processes”:
processes that involve “the mutually reinforcing dynamics of several feedforward steps” (513).
Her examination of this type of chemical phenomena reveals a type of circular causality that is
characteristic of autopoietic systems in general. Juarrero identifies an instance in her example of
autocatalysis where “one of its products is necessary for the activation of the product itself”
(513). The type of recursive causality that Juarrero identifies is a necessary mechanism in the
self-organization of complex systems, where emergent wholes gain the ability to read their
environments meaningfully and then transfer that meaning into internal operations, generating
physical responses that cohere with environmental conditions. How else will the plant by my
front window adjust its orientation toward the sunlight, especially in December when its source
hangs so low in the sky?
Describing the emergence of “top-down” system dynamics, Juarero writes:
“In each case a thermodynamic gradient is created and intensified such that it reaches a critical threshold where a
random perturbation or fluctuation is amplified, driving the system over the phase transition into a new level of
organization marked by the appearance of a new macroscopic structure, a metastable pattern of relationships
embodying the coherent, coordinated behaviour of previously independent particles. This new macroscopic regime
exhibits novel systemic properties that were previously absent and which cannot be reduced to the mere aggregation
or summation of the properties of the component parts. And the process as a whole restricts the degrees of freedom
of the components such that the overall process regenerates.” (513).
The present essay questions the nature of the enigmatic causal relations that produce the
phenomenon described above by Juarrero, an inquiry that can be stated as follows: What is the
nature of the relationship between the two distinct causal domains of meaningful difference and
thermodynamic/physical force such that novelty in complex systems can arise spontaneously and
be sustained structurally? In the following section I will introduce a concept that designates such
a space of inter-causality, one which has identified itself to me as the moneky.
Look Inside the Moneky
“I saw a silver-plated cobweb at the centre of a black pyramid; I saw all the mirrors on the planet and none reflected
me”
- Jorge Luis Borges, The Aleph
I have a well-worn paperback copy of Gregory Bateson’s Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972)
published by Ballantine Books. In it there is an essay titled “Cybernetic Explanation” which was
originally published in American Behavioural Scientist, Vol. 10, No. 8, April 1967, pp. 29-32.
The essay discusses concepts that are central to cybernetics as a mode of analysis, such as
feedback, constraints, circuits, redundancy, etc. On page 400 of my Ballantine edition, Bateson
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discusses restraints by posing a familiar hypothetical scenario where monkeys are set up at
typewriters in such a way that would have them pressing keys at random. “If we find a monkey
striking a typewriter apparently at random but in fact writing meaningful prose, we shall look for
restraints”, writes Bateson. He then finishes the sentence as follows: “either inside the moneky or
inside the typewriter” (1972, 400). In the second half of the sentence, it seems likely at first that
Bateson is suggesting that we look inside the monkey, and that there’s a typo misspelling monkey
to appear as moneky. However, based on the theoretical content of this and other essays written
by Gregory Bateson, I suggest that this typo introduces a helpful new concept into his
ontological framework of information: the moneky.
Above is an image of the typo in my personal copy of Bateson’s essay. Below is pictured the
letter “e” in the misspelled word “moneky” as seen through a small microscope.
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In my research I have identified this “e” to be the errant letter in the typo. Future scholars have
since taken aim at the letter “k” (not pictured) because it is less commonly used than “e” in the
English language (this sentence alone contains twenty-seven instances with the letter “e”
compared to only one “k” (not inkluding typos or those identified in quotations)). According to
Claude Shannon’s Measure of Information, “k” contains more information than “e” because it’s
easier to guess what letters might be next to a “k” in the English language; given that there are
far fewer options than the possible neighbours that “e” might have (Ben-Naim 82). It is assumed
that the letter “k” is also focused on because of the specific use of that letter on page 402 of the
same essay as the typo, where “k” is used as an example of how information can be quantified in
written languages (pictured below).
Lila Gatlin has this to contribute:
“If I take the pieces from a Scrabble game and mix them up in a completely disordered pile, we characterize this
state of the system [as] random, disordered…. If entropy measures the randomness of a system, this is clearly a state
of high entropy. If I take each piece and turn it face up on the table, the entropy is lowered and, if I separate the
letters into two groups, one containing only vowels and the other only consonants, the entropy has been lowered
further” (1972, 28)).
No one disagrees, thankfully, that it is unnecessary to think of both the “k” and the “e” in
“moneky” as being in the wrong place, since the more elegant scientific explanation identifies
just one single letter out of place. My claim that the culprit is “e” is based on the temporal logic
of English writing, where the “e” is encountered before the “k” in “moneky”. Still, some will
argue that encountering the “e” first is what alerts the reader to the incorrect position of the “k”,
thus it is not the incorrectness of the “e” that we are experiencing, but the lack of the “k” to
cradle the “e” in its rightful position.
Below left is pictured the period at the end of the sentence containing the typo, seen through the
same microscope. This period, though not necessary to my present argument, holds some
significance in the context of this paper by virtue of the fact that it can be recognized as almost
exactly the same as the final period of the essay, which is pictured on the right.
5
The final sentence in Bateson’s essay “Cybernetic Explanation” reads as follows: “All that is not
information, not redundancy, not form and not restraints — is noise, the only possible source of
new patterns” (1972, 410). Following this statement, I suggest that the typo “the moneky” can be
characterized as noise out of which has emerged a new pattern of information in the form of the
meaningful concept the moneky. With this concept it becomes possible to provide an explanation
for the emergence of this concept from out of a typo. In other words, the concept the moneky
identifies an operational space that connects two distinct domains of causality. As such, I claim
that it is by way of the moneky that far-from-equilibrium states of information can organize
themselves into structures in the material world. The moneky, then, describes an inter-causal
bridge that links difference with force, or as Bateson would say, “the creatura” with “the
pleroma” (1972, 456). Interactions between the distinct causal domains of difference and force
that the moneky makes possible give rise to new patterns of meaning in the material world,
because the moneky enables a phenomenon called “top-down causation”: when an emergent
property, interacting with (or as) the causal domain of difference, is able to redistribute that
difference meaningfully back down to its constituent parts, in-forming the latter by transforming
meaning into thermodynamic processes (Juarrero, 519). It is through this phenomenon of inter-
causality that complex systems are able to maintain stability in environments containing
elements of contingency. It is through this phenomenon of inter-causality that novel
configurations of complex material relations continue to grow and complexify and transform
through and around us, from technological systems of communication to governments and
rainforests. Inside the moneky hides the Aleph.
6
Irreversible Spreading: Is That All There Is?
“Spreading occurs as radiation, as the big bang, as change that does not return in linear time”
- Dorion Sagan, Cosmic Apprentice
Entropy is a controversial concept for reasons beyond the scope of this essay. However, I will
summarize my use of the term here for you, generous reader, and you can hold it to your inner
fire to see if it melts. In the mid-nineteenth century, Rudolf Clausius assigned the name entropy
to a law in the field of thermodynamics that describes the tendency for energy to spread. He
created the word out of a combination of “energy” and “tropos”, the latter being Greek for
transformation (Sagan, 92). As such, the concept of entropy denotes the tendency for energy to
spread from clustered states, which are seen as improbable, toward more evenly distributed
states, which are more probable (Boltzmann, 443). This direction of energy spread in the
thermodynamic world establishes a time-irreversibility that follows a linear path towards a basic
telos known as heat death: the final state of the universe wherein all energy is spread out evenly
in such a way that all probability distributions are basically equal (Sagan, 97-98). Dorion Sagan
offers a cogent example of entropic phenomena at a relatable scale:
“If you place a hot piece of iron on another, cooler piece of iron, ‘heat energy’ flows to the cooler iron until the two
become exactly the same temperature. Technically, the ‘heat energy that flows’ is actually the vibrational energy of
atoms dancing in place in the metal that, on average, are moving faster in the warmer iron bar than in the cooler. At
the surface of contact, the vibrations of the warmer bar interact with slightly slower vibrations in the cooler bar, and
over time the surplus energy of the warmer bar disperses. It spreads out, so the vibrations of atoms held in place are
at the same energy levels in both bars” (96-97).
The second law introduced by Clausius, and later formalized statistically by Ludwig Boltzmann,
is probabilistic rather than deterministic: Boltzmann’s theorem “did not describe the
impossibility of an evolution that would lead to a spontaneous decrease in entropy and would,
therefore, contravene the second law of thermodynamics, but only its improbability” (Stengers,
24). This model of spreading is often taken to be a fundamental physical process in the universe,
and one that can be interpreted to explain the phenomenon of time as experienced by living
systems. In their book Order Out of Chaos (1984), Isabelle Stengers and Ilya Prigogine
introduced the notion of “dissipative structures” into the ontology of thermodynamics as
evidence that the mathematical abstraction of time-reversibility is not a universal trait of the
physical world. Dissipative structures exist in an irreversible linear time that is non-deterministic,
giving rise to novel complex systems in far-from-equilibrium states that cannot be understood as
time-reversible phenomena (Prigogine, 7:00-11:38). If they have access to energy in their
environment, dissipative structures will maintain their own structure by extracting order from
their surroundings and then sending it back out as entropy (Hoelsher, 46).
In response to Prigogine’s model of time irreversibility in physics, David Bohm offers the
following: “Prigogine has heavily emphasized irreversible processes…. In my view, however,
the concept of time must involve both irreversible process and recurrent (cyclical) process.
Without the latter, there would be no ‘backdrop’, making possible a measure of time sufficiently
reliable and universal to allow us to distinguish between what is meant by reversibility and
irreversibility” (Bohm, 1987, 675). What Bohm identifies in this passage precisely characterizes
the pseudo-celestial memory field that I will outline in the next section. Briefly, the “backdrop”
that allows us to question and communicate the topic of causality meaningfully is a field of
7
memory containing a shared set of relational forms which generate information through their
difference. The pseudo-celestial domain, or as we will designate it later via Bateson, the
Creatura, is the source of negentropic difference production which interacts causally with the
physical world by circling through the moneky as “meaning” (Bohm, 1985, 160).
In my examination of these causal processes, I aim to situate the entropic causality that
characterizes thermodynamic reality alongside the negentropic causality that characterizes that of
meaningful difference, the latter operating through emergent properties in a non-linear (circular)
manner. As such, I propose that these two causal flows operate in tandem within a fundamental
field of observation, giving rise together to a dynamic reality that unfolds through irreversible
and recurrent time, of which we are observers (participants) observers (participants) observers (participants) observers
Becoming Spiral
“Recursivity is not only a mechanism that can effectively ‘domesticate’ contingency, as we have seen in Hegel; it is
also a mechanism that allows novelty to occur, not simply as something coming from outside but also as an internal
transformation”
- Yuk Hui, Recursivity and Contingency
Contingency and Recursivity are two concepts that help describe the looping process that defines
self-organizing systems. These circular causal networks sustain the basic order of complex
systems (systems that reproduce their emergent properties) while keeping them open to new
possibilities of being (Hui 4). Recursivity is the mechanism that allows complex systems to form
new patterns of communication with other systems that they’re coupled with, as well as to form
entirely new couplings that offer potential for new modes of becoming. In Recursivity and
Contingency, philosopher Yuk Hui states: “Recursion is both structural and operational, through
which the opposition between being and becoming is sublated” (4). The looping operation of a
complex system, one that Hui suggests can be imagined as a “spiral form” (4), describes its
ability to absorb unanticipated possibilities, or contingencies, in a way that, like the body’s
immune system, does not simply attempt to block anything it considers alien but rather remains
open to new integrations of external reality that would complexify its internal processes
(Luhmann 150). In other words, complex systems of all kinds employ mechanisms of recursivity
to respond to contingency “not to eliminate it but rather to integrate it as necessity” (Hui 11).
As Keith Ansell-Pearson observes of recursivity in biological systems, “Biologists have
established that the nucleated cell of eukaryotic life evolved by acquisition . . . of inherited
bacterial symbionts. Merged beings that infected one another were reinvigorated by the
incorporation of their permanent ‘disease’” (Ansell-Pearson, p.182). Drawing on the work of
biologist Lynn Margulis and her theory of symbiogenesis, Ansell-Pearson describes the recursive
processes of becoming that characterize the ontogenesis of eukaryotic cellular life. Such
processes occur when emergent properties can reorganize their own internal processes in such a
way that is able to incorporate radical contingencies, such as other living systems. As I have
observed before, Margulis’ model of symbiogenesis identifies “infectious entities such as
viruses, bacteria, and parasites as integral agents of ecological change. According to Margulis the
constituent parts of animal cells were all once autonomous bacterium that came together at
different times to form symbiotic partnerships... Eventually forming an autonomously
functioning, self-reproducing cell” (Biddle, 2017, 2).
8
This model of recursivity as an operation of the systemic incorporation of contingency is echoed
in Franz Kafka’s curiously uncanny leopard aphorism:
“Leopards break into the temple and drink all the sacrificial vessels dry; it keeps happening; in the end, it can be
calculated in advance and is incorporated into the ritual.” (Kafka, 1931)
Kafka’s aphorism situates the leopards as contingent aspects of an environment within which the
ritual operates recursively. The ritual is a reflexive property that emerges out of (or as) a system
of relationships between various aspects, including the cracked walls of the temple and its
dedicated practitioners with hunched backs and gaunt faces. [RECURSIVITY IS THE
CONSTRAINING MECHANISM BY WHICH THE WHOLE ORIENTS ITS PARTS
TOWARD THE REPRODUCTION OF THE WHOLE]. It is only by means of this recursive
mode of becoming that the ritual is able to reproduce itself with the leopards as part of it. When
it does achieve a new state of being that includes the leopards within its network of constituent
parts, secular outsiders claim to notice the gradual disappearance of the spots in the leopard’s fur.
Through the narrow temple windows, the bodies of the leopards, it seems, are transforming the
ancient architecture; smoothing out the edges of every frieze as they rub against them daily.
One of Lynn Margulis’ more radical proposals is that “all the phenomena of the mind, from
perception to consciousness, originated from an unholy microscopic alliance between hungry
swimming killer bacteria and their potential archaebacterial victims. The hungry killers were
extraordinarily fast swimming, skinny bacteria called spirochetes. These active bacteria are
relatives of the spirochetes of today that are associated with the venereal disease that, in
prolonged and serious cases, infects the brain: the treponemes of syphilis. The fatter, slow-
moving archaebacteria incorporated their fast-moving would-be killers into their bodies. The
archaebacteria survived, continuing to be infected by the spirochetes. The odd couple survived.
The archaebacteria were changed: they were made more motile, but not killed by their attackers”
(51). In this example, the spiral-shaped parasitic bacteria described by Margulis was absorbed by
a larger spiral, that of recursivity.
Recursive operations in complex systems reproduce their emergent properties by establishing
constraints that affect the probability distributions of their component parts. In the ancient and
sacred Erewhonian text The Book of Machines, the anonymous author suggests that machines
might eventually take the dominant position in society by producing environmental constraints
that control human behaviour in ways that benefit the reproduction of more complex machines:
“Who shall say that a man does see or hear? He is such a hive and swarm of parasites that it is
doubtful whether his body is not more theirs than his, and whether he is anything but another
kind of ant-heap after all. May not man himself become a sort of parasite upon the machines? An
affectionate machine-tickling aphid?” (Butler, 1872, 232). This passage was written as a warning
to the Erewhonian people to be cautious of the technological ecosystem that they were
constructing all around them. The warning suggests that a vast enough assemblage of
technological subsystems might easily give rise to emergent properties – causal agents arising
out of complex relations of technological networks – capable of perceiving their environment
meaningfully and subsequently constraining their constituent parts, both human and machine
alike. The prophet foresees how such a transformation would have humanity absorbed into the
autopoietic activities of technological systems. In other words, the author warns of the possibility
9
that humans could become stuck in a position where the reproduction of certain technological
activities would be their sole purpose in life. Later in the text the author states:
We are misled by considering any complicated machine as a single thing; in truth it is a city or society, each member
of which was bred truly after its kind. We see a machine as a whole, we call it by a name and individualize it; we
look at our own limbs, and know that the combination forms an individual which springs from a single center of
reproductive action; we therefor assume that there can be no reproductive action which does not arise from a single
center; but this assumption is unscientific, and the bare fact that no vapor-engine was ever made entirely by another,
or two others, of its own kind, is not sufficient to warrant us in saying that vapor-engines have no reproductive
system. The truth is that each part of every vapor-engine is bred by its own special breeders, whose function it is to
breed that part, and that only, while the combination of the parts into a whole forms another department of the
mechanical reproductive system, which is at present exceedingly complex and difficult to see in its entirety.
Complex now, but how much simpler and more intelligibly organized may it not become in another hundred
thousand years? Or in twenty thousand? For humans at present believe that their interests lie in that direction; they
spend an incalculable amount of labour and time and thought in making machines breed always better and better
[…] It must always be remembered that the human body is what it is through having been molded into its present
shape by the chances and changes of many millions of years, but that its organization never advanced with anything
like the rapidity with which that of the machines is advancing.
Were the Erewhonian prophet ever to catch a glimpse of the technological communication
systems within which present societies have embedded themselves and which they are
increasingly constrained to reproduce, the prophet would likely be relieved that his warnings
prevented Erewhonian society from encountering a similar fate.
The spiral form evoked by Hui is significant because it suggests that, by operating in recursive
loops, a system continually moves into higher dimensions of being in order to observe itself in
relation to its environment. This suggests that self-organizing systems reproduce their own
boundaries by moving outward into a dimension of reality that exceeds the limits of the reality
they observe. Recursivity, then, is a process of becoming that operates in a realm of observation,
and which moves outward in the very direction from which contingency enters into the world.
Hui identifies the necessity of contingency in the becoming of complex systems, which I
interpret as meaning that contingency and recursivity are two different ways of looking at the
foundational dimension of reality: observation.
Image taken from A Primer of Higher Space (1913) by Claude Bragdon
10
It is worth noting that the spiral form is identified by José Ortega y Gasset as the formal
characteristic of philosophizing, too (1964, 71). As such, philosophy orients the becoming of a
social system, where the constituent parts of the system (the people) are causally affected
(constrained) by the observations of the emergent whole (the society). “Life”, claims Ortega y
Gasset, “cannot avoid philosophizing” (74). He later proposes that the philosophical impulse
inherent in all human beings is uniquely “disturbed” by the reality it encounters: “Within the
biological and utilitarian human there is another human, daring and sportive, who, rather than
making life easy by exploiting the real, complicates it by replacing the world’s tranquility with
the restlessness of problems. This basic leaning toward theory on the part of the human being we
find to have an ultimate fact in the cosmos […] Do not tell yourselves that it is necessity or some
practical problem which obliges us to pose theoretic problems to ourselves” (82-82). Here Ortega
y Gasset is concerned with the unavoidable human tendency to generate ever-more complex
arrangements of information in the world in spite of their general irrelevance to the survival of
the biological human body. In an earlier iteration of this spiraling philosophical inquiry, Ortega y
Gasset circles his topic by evoking Plato’s “supercelestial region”, where the ancient Greek
philosopher identified the existence of Ideas as originating “outside the temporal world” (23).
This model of reality, according to Ortega y Gasset, “allows us to represent our temporal world
to ourselves as a sphere surrounded by another circumference having a different ontological
atmosphere where live the nontemporal truths, indifferent to time” (23). Locating ideas outside
the temporality of the material world separates them from the causal order of matter. Thus. in
this metaphysical framework ideas do not interact causally with physical bodies. “Thought, then,
is a point where two worlds, antagonistic in comparison, come together”, states Ortega y Gasset
(21). If thought is the opening to the Temporal Temple through which Ideas randomly break in,
do the sacrificial vessels have any other purpose than to seduce the Supercelestial Leopards?
Plato’s metaphysical dualism establishes two separate causal realities that are somehow unified
in the unique operations of human thought, where physical reality is chaotic and everchanging
while the transcendent realm of Ideas is fixed and immutable. Recalling the irreversible time
proposed by Prigogine and Stengers in their notion of dissipative structures, we can see how the
latter model of reality is incompatible with the Platonic theory of Forms on the basis that
dissipative structures emerge through a truly novel unfolding of reality along an undetermined
and irreversible course. The idea of pure informational forms existing outside of time as a telos
toward which the material world is drawn undermines the notion of becoming that is so central to
Prigogine’s approach to physics (Bohm, 1987, 675). Somewhere in between these two models
there is a description of reality that stays true to novelty arising out of chance while still
affording those novel structures a chance to be preserved somewhere in the memory of the
cosmos; sustained as sources of meaning to which the world can circle back and be in-formed. A
causal model like that would reconcile the irreversibility of complex becoming with a second
order of causality that spirals into itself, returning to previous forms sustained in its memory and
recalling them through a dimension of difference. The linear domain of entropic causality gives
rise to contingencies which trigger meaningful responses that are pulled from the memory of
previous forms. In other words, drawing from this pseudo-celestial memory field in response to
material contingency brings into existence patterns which are based on some previously existent
form, but one which emerges again as necessarily different by virtue of the fact that it has
meaning in relation to previous iterations of itself (it exists in time).
11
Regarding Plato’s supercelestial region, Ortega y Gasset observes: “note that at a certain instant,
one of those truths, the law of gravitation, filtered down from that other world into our own, as if
taking advantage of the crevice which widened and let it pass” (23). The author goes on to
question why that single truth was able to pass through into the material world and manifest
itself, however imperfectly, in materially mediated patterns of information such as text and
speech? “Why was it not thought of before or afterwards? Why was its discoverer not someone
else?” (24). If we believe the infamous tale of the apple falling randomly next to Newton as he
sat pondering the world around him (an inescapable human impulse according to OyG), perhaps
it truly was that very particular contingent event which sprang forth from the environment to
create the potential for new meaning to emerge. Or, better yet, the falling apple was the other
side of the same reality that gave rise to the theory of gravitation, both phenomena occurring
simultaneously in distinct temporal modes. Bohm reminds us that “any change of meaning is a
change of soma, and any change of soma is a change of meaning” (163). In which case, this story
is made sensible by introducing the moneky as a meta-causal domain within which mind and
matter, or significance and soma, unfold as an entangled unity, distinct in causal logic but unified
in the immanence of observation.
Is that perhaps why the story of the apple falling on Newton’s head feels so satisfying? Because
it unifies these two distinct causal phenomena as two ways of understanding one singular reality,
weaving the supercelestial region into the immanent fabric of material reality? Perhaps because it
mythologizes the necessary presence of contingency for the emergence of new patterns of
meaningful information to become manifest in lived experience. If so, I suggest that it was
within the moneky that the causal domain of material force (the falling apple) and the emergence
of a new pattern of information in the causal domain of meaning (Newton’s Law of Universal
Gravitation) unfolded together as a single entangled reality. The falling apple arose out of linear
time in the thermodynamic causal domain, and, when apprehended at the level of meaning by
emergent properties, the apple triggered a response perpendicular to linear time, drawn from the
always-shifting pseudo-celestial realm: the cosmic memory field where novel forms are stored as
patterns of information that are neither fixed or immutable, but always subject to revision.
Difrence Makes Difference
“The territory decays, all the corners grow round, while the map becomes ever more detailed and sound”
- Linda Fox, Force and Difference: Two Movements, One Reality
In my study of the moneky, I employ second-order cybernetics – the science of observing
systems rather than observable systems – to establish an analysis at the relational level, where
meaning and matter can be understood as two distinct but inseparable poles of a singular process
of reality observing itself. In doing so, I am drawing on Gregory Bateson’s two-part causal
model that establishes how the physical / material / somatic world differs causally from the
world of difference / meaning / significance. In his essay Form, Substance and Difference,
Bateson borrows a metaphysical distinction from Carl Jung which the latter expresses using the
Gnostic terms “Pleroma” and “Creatura” (Bateson, 456). Bateson goes on to apply these terms
within a cybernetic framework to distinguish the domain of force from that of difference. He
characterizes difference as the essential quality of a “map” which emerges out of its relation to a
“territory” (Bateson, 457). Difference, then, is what gets from the territory onto the map.
12
Returning to the application of Jung’s Gnostic vocabulary, Bateson identifies the “Pleroma” as
the territory, “the world in which events are caused by forces and impacts and in which there are
no ‘distinctions’” (456). The “Creatura”, on the other hand, is identified as the domain of
mapped experience, where “effects are brought about precisely by difference” (456).
These two domains of reality form complexly interwoven circuits that loop “news of a
difference” back out as organizations of thermodynamic force. They can be distinguished from
each other by their energetic relations to the message in the loop: the Pleroma exists as a territory
of transformations derived from thermodynamic processes that move generally toward more
probable states of distribution, and within these processes difference generates no effects, all
interactions are “energized […] from ‘behind’” (Bateson, 454). The Creatura, in distinction, is a
world of effects brought about by differences as they enter a system through a sense organ and
trigger energetic responses powered by the system’s internal metabolic processes (456). To
distinguish these two modes of transformation using more common imagery, Bateson
characterizes the Pleroma by describing the interaction between two billiard balls, where all the
energy that sends a stationary billiard ball into motion is attributed to an external force, namely,
the impact of a moving billiard ball (403). In the causal domain of force, all activity is positively
energized. In that of difference, however, “nothing – that which is not – can be a cause… zero is
different from one, zero can be a cause in the psychological world, the world of communication.
The letter which you do not write can get an angry reply; the income tax form which you do not
fill in can trigger the [IRS] into energetic action, because they, too, have their breakfast, lunch,
tea, and dinner and can react with energy which they derive from their metabolism” (Bateson,
452).
As Identified by Bateson in the passage above, force always transfers positive amounts of energy
by pushing the world around, while difference activates the world by pulling energy out of a
system via its internal metabolic processes. Metabolic processes, of course, trigger responsive
circuits that send energy back out again as pushing force! This looping process between Pleroma
and Creatura gives rise to stable relations between operationally distinct thermodynamic systems
whose structures include: sense organs capable of perceiving difference at varying levels in the
world and responding to such difference with internally generated and energized state
formations; coupled environments which absorb those state changes through their own process of
perception followed by a reciprocal looping of difference and force (Matruana and Varela, 71).
As I’ve pointed to already in the present essay, David Bohm describes this looping between force
and difference similarly, using soma in place of Pleroma and significance in place of Creatura:
“Now we have in this process […] three aspects: soma and significance and an energy source
which carries the significance of soma to a subtler level and gives rise to a backward movement
in which the significance acts on the soma” (174). Out of this circular dynamic emerges a larger
cognitive process that extends beyond the boundaries of living systems to include aspects of the
environment(s) within which they are coupled. Bateson’s essential picture of the cybernetic loop
is that Creatura is the world seen as mind, with the “news of a difference” that travels the circuit
described above considered to be the basic unit of ideation (459). The Pleroma, then, is both the
cause and the effect of the Creatura, since it is the initial source of irritation that gave rise to
mapped difference as well as the manifestation of that same mental map looped back into the
world as thermodynamic state changes. In other words, within the Creatura occurs the mapping
13
of the Pleroma through the perception of difference as input, and the internally generated
production of physical (re)organization as output; the form of the latter corresponding to the
former in a way that is determined by the “ontogeny” of the “perturbed” system (Maturana and
Varela, 75).
Negentropy of Difference
“The brain is negentropic, the life of the universe”
- Philip K Dick, The Exegesis of Philip K Dick
The Pleroma, a domain of “forces and impacts”, is characterized by an entropic tendency to
move toward more probable thermodynamic states, where energy is increasingly spread out over
time (456). The Creatura, on the other hand, is a domain of “differences which can activate some
sense organ” (456-57). I have made the claim that such a domain operates negentropically. This
characteristic of the Creatura, which I refer to as Negentropy of Difference, is the tendency for
difference to cluster increasingly into more complex, less probable states. As such, the output of
living systems organizes the world with a drive for difference to be preserved in the
environment: reproducing forms; making the territory more like the map; and triggering
feedback loops of difference production. For example, the dissipative structures described by
Prigogine and Stengers will reorganize aspects of their environment in order to maintain their
own boundaries, and the more complex their operations become the more sensitive they are to
changes in the environment (Sagan, 100).
An example of dissipative structures as oscillatory chemical reactions called the Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction.
Image taken from: Tiezzi, E, et al.“Dissipative structures in nature and human systems” WIT Transactions on
Ecology and the Environment, Vol 114. WIT Press, 2008. P. 294
Transformations in the environment of dissipative structures are taken to be fundamentally
entropic, since they consume order and spit back out the unusable bones of entropy. However, I
14
claim their autopoietic activities form traces in the world that leave behind information
corresponding to their lived experience, which can register meaningfully with other systems and
thus trigger more difference. In other words, dissipative structures restructure their environments
into more complex, less probable patterns of information as difference, most notably in their
ability to “undergo bifurcations, separating to new, perhaps higher-energy meta-stable energy
regimes (Sagan, 100).
Living systems themselves can be thought of as patterns of information that beget information,
precisely through their ability to stabilize configurations of matter to form constraints which
expand the phase space of the system: “potential information is created because additional
alternatives suddenly become available” (Juarrero 515). As stated by Alvero Moreno and Matteo
Mossio in their comprehensive text Biological Autonomy (2015): “In this view, the environment
becomes a world full of significance: facts that from the outside may appear just as purely
physical or chemical develop into positive, negative, or neutral influences on the system,
depending on whether they contribute to, hinder or have no effect on the maintenance of its
dynamic identity. Even the simplest living organism creates a set of preferential partitions of the
world, converting interactions with their surrounding media into elementary values[…]
autonomy implies a meaningful relation with the environment” (xxix). In this quote we can see
that Moreno and Mossio identify a causal domain that is operationally distinct from that of the
“purely physical or chemical” in order to observe the negentropic effects that meaning has on not
only living systems, but, according to Bohm, aspects of physical reality at every level. For
Bohm, the causal operations of meaning are enfolded indefinitely into material structures and are
not just limited causally to the activity of biological organisms (1985, 162). This enfoldment of
meaning into the immanent physical world recalls the memory field I outlined above, where
novel forms get preserved as informational patterns with the potential to be reactivated in
response to environmental conditions. Contrary to Plato’s transcendent realm of Ideas, however,
this pseudo-celestial realm has a “memory of a dynamic kind – not based upon static storage but
upon the travel of information around the circuit” (Bateson, 459). Thus, the Creatura preserves
meaning through its ongoing circulation in the Pleroma.
Identifying one of the most immediately observable instances where meaning corresponds to
transformations in matter, Bohm points to blood distribution in the human brain during mental
activity (178), where he notes that “every time you think, the blood distribution all over the brain
changes; every emotion changes it… there is also a tremendous connection with the heartbeat
and the chemical constitution of the blood” (178). Recent studies into the use of psychedelic
drugs focus similarly on the distribution of blood in the brain to analyze how new experiences of
meaning are made possible by chemically altered brain states (Carhart-Harris et al.). The
“Entropic Brain” theory proposes that the modelling function of the brain can be affected by
psychedelic drug use in such a way that redistributes blood flow into more probable (entropic)
states throughout the brain, which, roughly speaking, dissolves familiar correspondences that the
brain might have previously established through a process of modelling familiar environments
(Carhart-Harris et al., 2014). As such, the entropic brain experiences a decrease in familiarity
with its environment and thus perceives it with less expectation than would normally be
established by the normal modelling function of blood distribution in the brain. Here we can see
how the characterization of entropic is given to the brain when the blood distribution is more
spread out, rather than clustered in unlikely patterns. The effect this entropic physical state has
15
on meaning in the affected subject, however, is for them to observe the environment with less
expectation and more surprise. A wave in the environment, for example, won’t be seen through a
filter of previous mappings, and thus might be perceived as a more complex set of differential
relations; material qualities rather than conceptual ones. Here, then, is an example of how the
two causal domains of soma and significance, or Pleroma and Creatura respectively, can be
understood as flowing in different directions within one deeper reality. The psychedelic
experience is one where meaning arises in high orders of complexity alongside less organized,
more probable physical brain states.
Returning to Gregory Bateson’s Creatura / Pleroma distinction, Bateson asserts that “systems
operate to create difference”, and that “any such difference is ‘negative entropy’” (457). The
reality that emerges out of the relation between the Pleroma and Creatura is one of ongoing
creativity, since the tendency for the Pleroma to flow toward more probable thermodynamic
states (entropy) offers a reciprocal process of transformation by which novel patterns of
difference arise in the Creatura. Such informational patterns establish themselves as meaningful
physical structures in the Pleroma, where their forms are destabilized by the movement of force
away from improbable energy gradients. In other words, materialized meaning continually falls
apart, degrades, and decays, which creates noise as soil for the growth of new meaning. Living
systems emerge autopoietically out of thermodynamic environments as spontaneous outpourings
of negentropic organization into physical environments. Their struggle is to maintain order in the
face of a world that is constantly falling apart, like a spider rebuilding its web after every few
struggling meals. Their joy is to face a world that is constantly falling apart from a place of
order, like the reader sitting by a fire inside a cozy cabin while the rain comes pouring down
outside.
As has been established, the moneky identifies a causal bridge between two distinct domains of
causality. By connecting these causal domains, the moneky allows for the rich complex world we
live in to evolve according to the transformations of self-organizing systems, where complex
patterns of information can actualize themselves as material structures and then be subject to
entropic degradation. Processes of material disorganization create new configurations of matter
that give rise to novel interpretations of meaning in the domain of information; the recursive
interplay of these two causal processes sustains a world of ongoing transformation and
interpretation. What a strange delight to be a part of it! G Spencer Brown enchantingly describes
the recursive mechanism at the fundamental level of the cosmos: “Thus, we cannot escape the
fact that the world we know is constructed in order to see itself. This is indeed amazing. Not so
much in view of what it sees, although this may appear fantastic enough, but in respect of the
fact that it can see at all. But in order to do so, evidently it must first cut itself up into at least one
state which sees, and at least one other state which is seen” (105). Brown’s strange evocation of
a universe constructed in order to see itself flickers delicately like the image of a crashing wave
reflected in a child’s eyes.
The moneky didn’t always exist though. There was a time when meaning never interacted with
the physical world, and vice versa. This was a time that was devoid of time (since the registration
of time requires meaningful encounters with matter). So where did it the moneky come from? To
answer this question I turn to the Gnostic interpretation of Genesis, which articulates the origins
of the moneky appropriately through paradox. Paradox is needed to evoke the origins of the
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moneky because it is only through paradox that material organizations of meaning fold back on
themselves to create informational loops, where the information being communicated cannot be
integrated into its context meaningfully and thus draws attention to the immanence of its material
form. For example, the sentence “this sentence is false” is paradoxical because, if it is integrated
into its context as being true, it becomes false, and thus loops back into the world as new
difference. On the other hand, if it taken as false, then it simultaneously becomes true and
sustains itself again as a closed loop of difference that doesn’t produce more information or get
integrated into its context. Either way, the significance doesn’t coherently transform into
corresponding somatic states. Let’s see what Kafka has to say:
“The crows assert that a single crow could destroy the heavens. This is certainly true, but it proves nothing against
the heavens, because heaven means precisely: the impossibility of crows.” (1931)
Paradox allows observers to experience the distinctiveness of those two causal domains that are
unified by the moneky: force and difference. More generally, I claim that what is experienced
through encounters with paradox is the observation of observing. In the next section we will look
at how the observation of observation is central to the Gnostic story of Genesis, and the
phenomenon of Gnosis in general.
Observing Genesis
“This theology is the only true one, but it has no content”
- Arthur Schopenhauer (as quotes by Borges in From Someone to No One)
Gnosticism is a pre-Christian theology that draws loosely on Platonic philosophy and is
characterized by the rejection of an illusory world (Smith 2). The seemingly dualistic
metaphysics found in Gnosticism divides reality into the spirit realm and the material realm - the
real world and the illusory world, respectively. However, a more complex understanding of
Gnostic metaphysics might find that the distinction between matter and spirit is more
fundamentally nested within a singular reality, where matter and spirit are seen to be enfolded
into a more fundamental field of being: observation. The Gnostic metaphysics that I am
presenting here is an undivided, immanent reality that becomes a duality only through (within)
observation. It is within observation that figure / ground relations can exist, which together form
the basic unit of difference as information. The difference between a figure and its ground is the
smallest amount of information there is. “The introduction of a mark – whether a stroke of paint,
a graphite line, a value shift, or a chisel mark – decreases the uniformity of [a] surface by
introducing differential structure, such as a figure-ground relationship” (Hoelscher 76). It is also
within observation that the undifferentiated world of force exists as a ground against which
difference is a sensible figure. But it would be false to assume that this means that entropic
causal reality is primary and that negentropic causal activity emerges within an entropic context
as secondary. The figure is not created by the ground. They produce one another through a
mutually dependent and relational existence, much like emergent properties and their constituent
parts do. Thus, in the Gnostic creation story I interpret that neither the spirit realm or the material
world are primary, since they mutually produce one another within a field of observing.
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A common practice in Gnostic mythologizing is known as “inverse exegesis”, which generally
operates by reinterpreting the myths of other religions through a framework of value reversals
and heretical meta-narratives (Smith, 60). At once this practice, like that of steganography,
operates through meta-difference, where the myth being interpreted is a source of difference that
gives rise to an even higher order of difference (and thus more information) based on the real /
illusory distinction that is used to re-interpret the story. Early Gnostics approached myth as a
dynamic process of revision and interrogation rather than a fixed description of reality. For this
reason, paradox was a powerful tool of Gnostic myth, allowing a myth to act “at once as the veil
over Truth, and as the way whereby Truth may be unveiled” (Hoeller, 101).
An example of inverse exegetic mythologizing can be found in the Gnostic retelling of the Book
of Genesis. In this version of the Genesis story there is a preface that tells of an “immeasurable,
ineffable, unknowable, unnameable” Godhead that cannot be described, but that can nevertheless
give rise to difference (Smith, 14-15). Here the Gnostics begin their creation story by
narrativizing the process by which any attempt to observe an absence of distinction will have
already created a distinction in its establishment of an observing state; a “state which sees”
(Brown, 105). This distinction will inevitably produce more of itself in the form of further
distinctions. As such, the Godhead in the Gnostic preface to Genesis, unfolding difference from
its undifferentiated core as the story progresses, reveals itself to be made up of various qualities.
These different qualitites, “like Mind, Silence, Depth, Love”, are identified as aeons (Smith, 15).
The initial aeons give rise to further distinctions described as younger aeons, the last of which is
named Sophia, meaning “wisdom” in Greek. Sophia, being the embodiment of the distinction of
wisdom, simultaneously gives rise to wisdom’s opposite quality: curiosity. Curiosity leads her to
wander away from the fullness of the Godhead: a state of undifferentiated spirit called the
Pleroma.
This is the first evocation of paradox in the Gnostic creation story, as it is Sophia’s curiosity
about the Godhead itself that causes it to become less accessible to her, or more precisely, in the
act of creating a distinction through observation, Sophia completes a circuit through which
meaning can loop back into the somatic world as a transformation of the somatic state (Bohm,
165-67), making that distinction simultaneously manifest in the world. Thus, in an attempt to
know the fullness of the Pleroma, Sophia gets lost in a cascade of distinctions and falls away
from the spiritual realm into the material world, where she is impregnated by the material world.
Sophia gives birth to the Demiurge, a being borne of difference who knows nothing of the
Godhead from which his mother originally emerged. The Demiurge, in his naïve belief that he
himself is the one and only God, creates the material world and declares it good (Smith, 15). In
autopoietic terms, the cosmos produces that which is responsible for the production of the
cosmos.
Using this Gnostic cosmogony to situate the causality of force and difference we can equate the
false realm of material reality to the Creatura and the true realm of spirit to the Pleroma.
Entropy, then, cannot be assumed to be the background against which life emerges as an unlikely
anomaly, because Entropy of Force which characterizes the Pleroma cannot be supposed to
precede Negentropy of Difference in the Creatura. Drawing on the logic of the Gnostic
interpretation of Genesis to consider this claim further, I argue that the Gnostic creation myth
that prefaces the Old Testament Genesis is an articulation of the paradoxical nature of the causal
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relationship between force and difference. There is no Pleroma until it observes itself through
difference, yet there is no Creatura until the appropriate thermodynamic conditions give rise to
sense organs capable of observing difference. This paradoxical description of force and
difference, which resembles the top-down causality described earlier by Juarrero, unifies the
spirit / matter distinction of metaphysical dualism within a monistic reality that Gnostic
metaphysics shares with that of second-order cybernetics: All is observing.
(Don’t believe it? Read this: “While sunlight and moisture on their own may not compel attention, when they relate
in a certain way in the presence of an observer, the result is the strange and alluring experience of a rainbow”
(Hoelscher, 17)).
Generating Observation
“Autopoietic explanatory models are not compatible with the current epistemological framework of academic
institutions, for the simple reason that institutional knowledge still expects all of its claims to arise out of clearly
identifiable chains of causality”.
- Dave Biddle, The Above Quote
In the Gnostic creation story, we can identify a mythological articulation of autopoiesis as the
basis for the existence of reality’s material dimension: “the reproduction of [illusory material]
from outcomes of [illusory material]” (Luhmann, 2000, 83). The Gnostic preface to Genesis
leaves off at the self-organization of a material cosmos emerging from a linear chain of
irreversible proliferation of difference, the latter being represented in Sophia’s fall from grace.
The strange circular causality used to describe the existence of physical reality as both the father
and son of the Demiurge, traps the reader in an illusory prison, where the Old Testament
continues the story, as if in a shift of perspective to the POV of the demiurge, at the moment
when God creates Heaven and Earth and declares it good. Thus, the inclusion of the preceding
Gnostic narrative of the true Godhead serves to reverse any truth claims made by the Book of
Genesis: the result of which is that the Garden of Eden is considered a prison for Adam and Eve
(who have each been secretly endowed with a single spark of divine light from the Pleroma in
order to animate their otherwise lifeless bodies); The snake becomes a saviour who is sent as an
agent of the Godhead to free Adam and Eve from their prison of illusory reality; Eve’s
willingness to trust the snake grants her hero status in this telling of Genesis; and the act of
eating the apple is the metaphorical moment of Gnosis, where the illusory nature of their world is
revealed to Eve and Adam as falsely fragmented against a backdrop of undifferentiated fullness
that is the Pleroma. However, what this story reveals to us is that, to witness the figure / ground
of reality as such, one must construct a meta-ground within which to contain it: observation.
In this particular case of inverse exegesis, we can make the claim that Gnosticism attempts to
offer a mythological articulation of second-order observation, by enfolding into its narrative
structure an “outside” to the story, where the Godhead is always observing from a space that is
characteristically “unmarked” (Luhmann, 2000, 119). The Godhead stands for the necessary
existence of the unobservable in any act of observation. Quoting Luhmann’s paradoxical
articulation of this claim, "Reality is what one does not perceive when one perceives it."(2002,
145). Sophia’s fall from the Pleroma, then, stands as a representation of any act of observation.
Quoting Luhmann again: “Observations use distinctions to describe something (and nothing
else). Observing is […] a highly complex operation which separates off what it is observing from
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what it is not observing with the aid of a distinction; and what it is not observing is always also
the operation of observing itself” (2000, 95).
We the observers of the creation myth are precisely what set it into motion: our observation of
the Pleroma implicates us as the creators of a distinction (a boundary around an object of
unbroken wholeness, from which Sophia is borne as an object of exclusion). This initial
distinction then cascades toward further states of distinction, as it is the natural tendency for
difference to move toward increasing states of improbability (Biddle, 2021, 11). The relation
between difference and the undifferentiated, the latter being what Gregory Bateson characterizes
as “thermodynamic force” (Bateson, 456), is foundational to any act of observation. The
presence of paradox in Gnostic mythologizing effectively collapses the dualistic relation between
fullness and fragmentation, or substance and form, to reveal a single phenomenon as the basis of
reality: observation.
Another of Kafka’s aphorisms might help circle us closer to our destination:
“The Expulsion from Paradise is eternal in its principal aspect: this makes it irrevocable, and our living in this world
inevitable, but the eternal nature of the process has the effect that not only could we remain forever in Paradise, but
that we are currently there, whether we know it or not.” (Kafka, 1931)
Oh Time Thy Pyramids
“In the vast Library there are no two identical books… the Library is total… its shelves register all the possible
combinations of the twenty-odd orthographical symbols”
- Anonymous Librarian in Babel
An important character in Gnostic mythology is the “Archon”, a pluriform agent of the
Demiurge – basically a bureaucratic figure in the material world whose function is to enforce
rules and keep people engaged with material tasks for the purpose of distracting them from
having experiences of Gnosis (Hoeller, 106). In Niklas Luhmann’s social systems theory,
systems such as the political system, the economic system, the mass media system, etc., all
function like modern Archons, and do so by deceptively engaging individuals on the basis that
they can participate in the outside world through the communicative processes of their
operations, when the real function of such communicative processes is to reproduce that system.
In a beautiful attempt to spread Gnosis over Twitter, @ZoeSTodd suggests that “the university
exists to reproduce the university. It wants all of your life energy funneled into reproducing its
structures. It’s important to remember that and organize accordingly” (Todd). Unfortunately,
attempts to communicate Gnosis often get deflected by Archons, since, for example, a platform
like Twitter exists to reproduce Twitter. It wants all of your life energy funneled into reproducing
its structures. It’s important to remember that and organize accordingly.
Social systems like the ones identified by Luhmann and Todd are emergent properties that
employ language referencing externality in order to constrain their participants or users to
produce more of the system – dissipative Archons who transform their environments to
complexify and sustain their patterns. To this end, the evolution of digital media technology has
established environments that can sustain more information using less material mediation. Such
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manifestations of difference do not quickly decay according to entropic spreading; a situation
that is increasingly similar to the dynamics between information and matter that is depicted in
The Library of Babel (Borges, 1962). In contemporary digital media environments, conspiracy
theorists employ Gnostic inverse exegesis to establish value reversals through which to
reinterpret media and create more information that will loop back into the material world in new
ways and give rise to new patterns of activity. Digital communication systems are emergent
properties that constrain their users with mediated references to a world outside their systemic
boundaries so that those users tend to reproduce more digital media to for circulation, which
creates the emergent properties of those systems. Digital communications systems, then, tend to
re-organize their environments in such a way that adds complexity to their communication
networks. Thus, conspiracy theory results from such systemic complexification by means of
cultural constraints such as neo-Gnosticism, implemented to compel people to create more media
channels that communicate more complex relations of information. However, since the concept
of Negentropy of Difference suggests that difference tends to organize itself in less probable
structures of meaning, the production not only of conspiracy theory but theory per se can be
situated within information’s negentropic tendency.
The theoretical claim that is implicit in the argument presented in the present paper is that any
experience of meaning can be causally explained by Negentropy of Difference as a tendency for
information to complexify indefinitely – just as in The Library of Babel we can say that any
experience of meaning (relegated by Borges to familiar organizations of symbols in books) can
be causally explained by the existence of infinite books containing every random assortment of
letters. In our world, then, it follows that every theoretical description of reality can and does
exist (if only latently) in the infinite potentiality of the moneky, but that there is some regulatory
disorganizing process (thermodynamic entropy) by which only certain meanings get reproduced
in the physical world as stable meaning structures. Digital media environments seem to be
overcoming much of those disorganizing processes by producing information that is less
susceptible to material decay.
Borges’ achievement in The Library of Babel is in allowing the story to simultaneously bring
itself into and out of meaningful existence through the relation between its form and content,
which, as text, implicitly re-enters the story back into the world that the story is describing. The
world that it describes abstracts text to the point that it is virtually all that exists as a structure of
meaning, disregarding a few supplemental artifacts which seem to be observable strictly for their
function. By that I mean that the physical world seems to be fixed and static, not subject to
entropic decay, an observation that can be identified in the fact that light bulbs never go out, and
the physical structures of the bookshelves and all other aspects of the hexagons do not fall apart
unless actively destroyed by their inhabitants (51). The self-immolation of the story comes when
the story itself is implicitly re-entered back into the world it describes and re-emerges in the
context of infinite variations of itself, all equally meaningless.
Similarly, a theory outlining Negentropy of Difference (this essay) must resolve itself in such a
way that, when it is re-entered into itself as content for analysis, it can only be understood as the
manifestation of the tendency for difference to move toward maximum improbability. In other
words, if it is taken as true that information does in fact tend toward less probable states in the
world, then we can say that the theory itself is untrue on the basis that it is meaningless. Like the
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“total book” that is speculated about in The Library of Babel (Borges, 56), the theory of
Negentropy of Difference renders all production of meaning to be contingent and arbitrary, since
all possible descriptions of reality are inevitable outcomes of information’s tendency to organize
into greater complexity. On the other hand, in order to disprove the theory of Negentropy of
Difference we would have to disprove the premise that difference, as defined by the Creatura,
tends to produce less-probable structures of meaning. To do so would require the employment of
the theory itself in order to claim that Negentropy of Difference is a false concept that has no
relation to the territory of the real world, but which has arisen purely out of the tendency for
descriptions of the world to produce more descriptions whether or not they relate to the true state
of reality (Negentropy of Difference). In other words, we would have to employ the theory as
true in order to prove its falseness.
Any other way of refuting the premise upon which this theory rests would only take us closer to
that final negentropic state, a state that I’m tempted to call “Idea Death” (or “Ideath” for short),
and would thus do nothing but bring itself closer to meaninglessness. One could, however, ask
one simple question that strikes at the heart of all metaphysical claims: if an articulation of the
most basic and irreducible feature of reality is to be considered true, as in, there are no further
distinctions that can be made at this level of description, then who can observe it?
Epilogue
“What matters isn’t whether or not one’s beliefs are true, but that one truly lives as though they were!”
- Everyone, Eventually
I didn’t write this, and I’m sorry if its meaning is troubling to you. Every time I finished typing
out a sentence (I still look at my fingers while typing) I would look up at the screen and see
unfamiliar passages. Incidentally I’ve also had the same dream every night since I began writing
this essay. It starts from my point of view: I am sitting on the beach; the waves are massive but
completely silent. When I look out at them my heart fills with sublime terror. But then the
perspective in the dream abruptly shifts so that I’m looking at myself in profile as I gaze out at
the ocean. My face is covered in warm sunlight and the air is still and peaceful. I’m a young boy
in the dream, without a single wrinkle on my face. Every so often the perspective shifts between
my point of view looking out at the ocean, and the one that reveals a young version of myself in
profile. Each couplet is identical to the previous one. After several changes back and forth
between perspectives – maybe six or seven – I return to the image of the crashing waves to find
it noticeably less terrifying. The waves seem the same size, but they are no longer frightening
because they appear ordered to me, as though I could intuitively predict every detail of how each
one will break onto the shore in its own way. Then, when it cuts back to the other perspective,
my younger self is looking directly back into the dream camera. A reflection of the waves
crashing is still visible in my youthful eyes. The reflection gradually fades away as I lean in
closer to the dream camera. Then, in an eight-year-old voice, I whisper the following words:
The Moneky: A Unification of Distinct Causal DomainsThe Whole [ABSTRACT]ed as a Part [MATERIAL IS OBSERVABLE ONLY AS INFORMATION AND VICE VERSA] In this essay I present a legible version of the following information: [PASTE ENTIRE ESSAY IN SIZE 1 FONT] Introduction “Any change of meaning is a change of soma, and any change of soma is a change of meaning” David Bohm, Soma-Significance and the Activity of Meaning Here begins a spiraling inquiry into the metaphysics of Causality. Applying a conceptual framework drawn primarily from second-order cybernetics and systems theory (Capra and Luisi, 2014), I aim to outline a two-part system of causation nested within a monistic metaphysical framework. As such, I’ll be following David Bohm’s model of “soma-significance” to look at how the causal domains of “soma and significance” (or as I will also talk about them: “force and difference”; “matter and meaning”; “Pleroma and Creatura”; “thermodynamics and information”) are two causal aspects of reality that are operationally distinct but fundamentally immanent and inseparable (1985, 161). The
central claim made in this paper is as follows: While the domain of causality characterized by thermodynamic/physical force tends toward more probable state distributions of matter and energy, a tendency that is identified in the concept of entropy, the domain of causality characterized by meaningful difference tends towards less probable state distributions of information. The latter of the two causal domains, I propose, unfolds negentropically. This tendency is what I refer to throughout the essay as Negentropy of Difference. In the context of the claim stated above, I intend to evoke the need to locate a mechanism of inter-causality, one that allows these two modes of causation to interact with one another; like the image of a crashing wave dancing on the surface of a child’s eye. To establish the need for such a meta-causal domain I will be drawing on the work of Alicia Jaurrero and her writing on causal relations between “emergent properties” and their “constituent parts” (2015, 512). Emergence occurs when “simple inputs undergo iterative feedback processes that yield complex and unpredictable results – such as a swarm formation of birds or fish, the
stock market, global weather patterns, and so on” (Hoelscher 44). To summarize my position, I interpret Juarrero’s work to describe emergent properties as properties that arise out of (or as) causal relations within stable material networks and which have the potential to gain real causal power in a domain determined by meaningful difference. Such causal power can either exert outward or circle back down into the configurational aspects of the material networks from which they emerged (Juarrero, 515). Emergent properties are significant to my research because they arise out of causal relations that they don’t operate by, and therefor interact with (or as) a separate domain of causal reality than the parts that give rise to them. In other words, emergent properties interact causally through difference as meaning, as opposed to the causality of physical force that determines their operational parts. In her essay What does the closure of context-sensitive constraints mean for determinism, autonomy, self-determination, and agency?, Juarrero examines “autocatalytic processes”: processes that involve “the mutually reinforcing dynamics of several feedforward steps”
(513). Her examination of this type of chemical phenomena reveals a type of circular causality that is characteristic of autopoietic systems in general. Juarrero identifies an instance in her example of autocatalysis where “one of its products is necessary for the activation of the product itself” (513). The type of recursive causality that Juarrero identifies is a necessary mechanism in the self-organization of complex systems, where emergent wholes gain the ability to read their environments meaningfully and then transfer that meaning into internal operations, generating physical responses that cohere with environmental conditions. How else will the plant by my front window adjust its orientation toward the sunlight, especially in December when its source hangs so low in the sky? Describing the emergence of “top-down” system dynamics, Juarero writes: “In each case a thermodynamic gradient is created and intensified such that it reaches a critical threshold where a random perturbation or fluctuation is amplified, driving the system over the phase transition into a new level of organization marked by the appearance of a new macroscopic structure, a
metastable pattern of relationships embodying the coherent, coordinated behaviour of previously independent particles. This new macroscopic regime exhibits novel systemic properties that were previously absent and which cannot be reduced to the mere aggregation or summation of the properties of the component parts. And the process as a whole restricts the degrees of freedom of the components such that the overall process regenerates.” (513). The central question in this essay addresses the enigmatic causal relations that produce the phenomenon described above by Juarrero, and can be stated as follows: What is the nature of the relationship between the two distinct causal domains of meaningful difference and thermodynamic/physical force such that novelty in complex systems can arise spontaneously and be sustained structurally? In the following section I will introduce a concept that designates such a space of inter-causality, which has identified itself as the moneky. Look Inside the Moneky “I saw a silver-plated cobweb at the centre of a black pyramid; I saw all the mirrors on the planet and none reflected me” Jorge Luis Borges, The Aleph I
have a well-worn paperback copy of Gregory Bateson’s Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972) published by Ballantine Books. In it there is an essay titled “Cybernetic Explanation” which was originally published in American Behavioural Scientist, Vol. 10, No. 8, April 1967, pp. 29-32. The essay discusses concepts that are central to cybernetics as a mode of analysis, such as feedback, constraints, circuits, redundancy, etc. On page 400 of my Ballantine edition, Bateson discusses restraints by posing a familiar hypothetical scenario where monkeys are set up at typewriters in such a way that would have them pressing keys at random. “If we find a monkey striking a typewriter apparently at random but in fact writing meaningful prose, we shall look for restraints”, writes Bateson. He then finishes the sentence as follows: “either inside the moneky or inside the typewriter” (1972, 400). In the second half of the sentence, it seems likely at first that Bateson is suggesting that we look inside the monkey, and that there’s a typo misspelling monkey to appear as moneky. However, based on the theoretical content of this and other essays written by Gregory Bateson, I
suggest that this typo introduces a helpful new concept into his ontological framework of information: the moneky. Above is an image of the typo in my personal copy of Bateson’s essay. Below is pictured the letter “e” in the misspelled word “moneky” as seen through a small microscope. In my research I have identified this “e” to be the errant letter in the typo shown above. Future scholars have since taken aim at the letter “k” (not pictured) because it is less commonly used than “e” in the English language (this sentence alone contains twenty-seven instances with the letter “e” compared to only one “k” (not inkluding typos or those identified in quotations)). According to Claude Shannon’s Measure of Information, “k” contains more information than “e” because it’s easier to guess what letters might be next to a “k” in the English language; given that there are far fewer options than the possible neighbours that “e” might have (Ben-Naim 82). (Lila Gatlin explains it better: “If I take the pieces from a Scrabble game and mix them up in a completely disordered pile, we characterize this state of the system [as] random, disordered…. If entropy measures the
randomness of a system, this is clearly a state of high entropy. If I take each piece and turn it face up on the table, the entropy is lowered and, if I separate the letters into two groups, one containing only vowels and the other only consonants, the entropy has been lowered further” (1972, 28)). No one disagrees, thankfully, that it is unnecessary to think of both the “k” and the “e” in “moneky” as being in the wrong place, since the more elegant scientific explanation identifies just one single letter out of place. My claim that the culprit is “e” is based on the temporal logic of English writing, where the “e” is encountered before the “k” in “moneky”. Still, some will argue that encountering the “e” first is what alerts the reader to the incorrect position of the “k”, thus it is not the incorrectness of the “e” that we are experiencing, but the lack of the “k” to cradle the “e” in its rightful position. Below left is pictured the period at the end of the sentence containing the typo, seen through the same microscope. This period, though not necessary to my present argument, holds some significance in the context of this paper by virtue of the fact that it can be recognized as
almost exactly the same as the final period of the essay, which is pictured on the right. The final sentence in Bateson’s essay “Cybernetic Explanation” reads as follows: “All that is not information, not redundancy, not form and not restraints — is noise, the only possible source of new patterns” (1972, 410). Following this statement, I suggest that the typo “the moneky” can be characterized as noise out of which has emerged a new pattern of information in the form of the meaningful concept the moneky. With this concept it becomes possible to provide an explanation for the emergence of this concept from out of a typo. In other words, the concept the moneky identifies an operational space that connects two distinct domains of causality. As such, I claim that it is by way of the moneky that far-from-equilibrium states of information can organize themselves into structures in the material world. The moneky, then, describes an inter-causal bridge that links difference with force, or as Bateson would say, “the creatura” with “the pleroma” (1972, 456). Interactions between the distinct causal domains of difference and force that the moneky makes possible give
rise to new patterns of meaning in the material world, because the moneky enables a phenomenon called “top-down causation”: when an emergent property, interacting with (or as) the causal domain of difference, is able to redistribute that difference meaningfully back down to its constituent parts, in-forming the latter by transforming meaning into thermodynamic processes (Juarrero, 519). It is through this phenomenon of inter-causality that complex systems are able to maintain stability in environments containing elements of contingency. It is through this phenomenon of inter-causality that novel configurations of complex material relations continue to grow and complexify and transform through and around us, from technological systems of communication to governments and rainforests. Inside the moneky hides the Aleph. Irreversible Spreading: Is That All There Is? “Spreading occurs as radiation, as the big bang, as change that does not return in linear time” Dorion Sagan, Cosmic Apprentice Entropy is a controversial concept for reasons beyond the scope of this essay. However, I will summarize my use of the term here for you, generous
reader, and you can hold it to your inner fire to see if it melts. In the mid-nineteenth century, Rudolf Clausius assigned the name entropy to a law in the field of thermodynamics that describes the tendency for energy to spread. He created the word out of a combination of “energy” and “tropos”, the latter being Greek for transformation (Sagan, 92). As such, the concept of entropy denotes the tendency for energy to spread from clustered states, which are seen as improbable, toward more evenly distributed states, which are more probable (Boltzmann, 443). This direction of energy spread in the thermodynamic world establishes a time-irreversibility that follows a linear path towards a basic telos known as heat death: the final state of the universe wherein all energy is spread out evenly in such a way that all probability distributions are basically equal (Sagan, 97-98). Dorion Sagan offers a cogent example of entropic phenomena at a relatable scale: “If you place a hot piece of iron on another, cooler piece of iron, ‘heat energy’ flows to the cooler iron until the two become exactly the same temperature. Technically, the ‘heat energy that flows’ is actually the
vibrational energy of atoms dancing in place in the metal that, on average, are moving faster in the warmer iron bar than in the cooler. At the surface of contact, the vibrations of the warmer bar interact with slightly slower vibrations in the cooler bar, and over time the surplus energy of the warmer bar disperses. It spreads out, so the vibrations of atoms held in place are at the same energy levels in both bars” (96-97). The second law introduced by Clausius, and later formalized statistically by Ludwig Boltzmann, is probabilistic rather than deterministic: Boltzmann’s theorem “did not describe the impossibility of an evolution that would lead to a spontaneous decrease in entropy and would, therefore, contravene the second law of thermodynamics, but only its improbability” (Stengers, 24). This model of spreading is often taken to be a fundamental physical process in the universe, and one that can be interpreted to explain the phenomenon of time as experienced by living systems. In their book Order Out of Chaos (1984), Isabelle Stengers and Ilya Prigogine introduced the notion of “dissipative structures” into the ontology of thermodynamics as evidence
that the mathematical abstraction of time-reversibility is not a universal trait of the physical world. Dissipative structures exist in an irreversible linear time that is non-deterministic, giving rise to novel complex systems in far-from-equilibrium states that cannot be understood as time-reversible phenomena (Prigogine, 7:00-11:38). If they have access to energy in their environment, dissipative structures will maintain their own structure by extracting order from their surroundings and then sending it back out as entropy (Hoelsher, 46). In response to Prigogine’s model of time irreversibility in physics, David Bohm offers the following: “Prigogine has heavily emphasized irreversible processes…. In my view, however, the concept of time must involve both irreversible process and recurrent (cyclical) process. Without the latter, there would be no ‘backdrop’, making possible a measure of time sufficiently reliable and universal to allow us to distinguish between what is meant by reversibility and irreversibility” (Bohm, 1987, 675). What Bohm identifies in this passage precisely characterizes the pseudo-celestial memory field that I will outline in the next
section. Briefly, the “backdrop” that allows us to question and communicate the topic of causality meaningfully is a field of memory containing a shared set of relational forms which generate information through their difference. The pseudo-celestial domain, or as we will designate it later via Bateson, the Creatura, is the source of negentropic difference production which interacts causally with the physical world by circling through the moneky as “meaning” (Bohm, 1985, 160). In my examination of these causal processes, I aim to situate the entropic causality that characterizes thermodynamic reality alongside the negentropic causality that characterizes that of meaningful difference, the latter operating through emergent properties in a non-linear (circular) manner. As such, I propose that these two causal flows operate in tandem within a fundamental field of observation, giving rise together to a dynamic reality that unfolds through irreversible and recurrent time, of which we are observers (participants) observers (participants) observers (participants) observers Becoming Spiral “Recursivity is not only a mechanism that can effectively ‘domesticate’
contingency, as we have seen in Hegel; it is also a mechanism that allows novelty to occur, not simply as something coming from outside but also as an internal tran sformation” Yuk Hui, Recursivity and Contingency Contingency and Recursivity are two concepts that help describe the looping process that defines self-organizing systems. These circular causal networks sustain the basic order of complex systems (systems that reproduce their emergent properties) while keeping them open to new possibilities of being (Hui 4). Recursivity is the mechanism that allows complex systems to form new patterns of communication with other systems that they’re coupled with, as well as to form entirely new couplings that offer potential for new modes of becoming. In Recursivity and Contingency, philosopher Yuk Hui states: “Recursion is both structural and operational, through which the opposition between being and becoming is sublated” (4). The looping operation of a complex system, one that Hui suggests can be imagined as a “spiral form” (4), describes its ability to absorb unanticipated possibilities, or contingencies, in a way that, like the body’s immune
system, does not simply attempt to block anything it considers alien but rather remains open to new integrations of external reality that would complexify its internal processes (Luhmann 150). In other words, complex systems of all kinds employ mechanisms of recursivity to respond to contingency “not to eliminate it but rather to integrate it as necessity” (Hui 11). As Keith Ansell-Pearson observes of recursivity in biological systems, “Biologists have established that the nucleated cell of eukaryotic life evolved by acquisition . . . of inherited bacterial symbionts. Merged beings that infected one another were reinvigorated by the incorporation of their permanent ‘disease’” (Ansell-Pearson, p.182). Drawing on the work of biologist Lynn Margulis and her theory of symbiogenesis, Ansell-Pearson describes the recursive processes of becoming that characterize the ontogenesis of eukaryotic cellular life. Such processes occur when emergent properties can reorganize their own internal processes in such a way that is able to incorporate radical contingencies, such as other living systems. As I have observed before (Biddle, 2017), Margulis’ model of
symbiogenesis identifies “infectious entities such as viruses, bacteria, and parasites as integral agents of ecological change. According to Margulis the constituent parts of animal cells were all once autonomous bacterium that came together at different times to form symbiotic partnerships... Eventually forming an autonomously functioning, self-reproducing cell” (Biddle, 2017, 2). This model of recursivity as an operation of the systemic incorporation of contingency is echoed in Franz Kafka’s curiously uncanny leopard aphorism: “Leopards break into the temple and drink all the sacrificial vessels dry; it keeps happening; in the end, it can be calculated in advance and is incorporated into the ritual.” Kafka’s aphorism situates the leopards as contingent aspects of an environment within which the ritual operates recursively. The ritual is a reflexive property that emerges out of (or as) a system of relationships between various aspects, including the cracked walls of the temple and its dedicated practitioners with hunched backs and gaunt faces. [RECURSIVITY IS THE CONSTRAINING MECHANISM BY WHICH THE WHOLE ORIENTS ITS PARTS
TOWARD THE REPRODUCTION OF THE WHOLE]. It is only by means of this recursive mode of becoming that the ritual is able to reproduce itself with the leopards as part of it. When it does achieve a new state of being that includes the leopards within its network of constituent parts, secular outsiders claim to notice the gradual disappearance of the spots in the leopard’s fur. Through the narrow temple windows, the bodies of the leopards, it seems, are transforming the ancient architecture; smoothing out the edges of every frieze as they rub against them daily. One of Lynn Margulis’ more radical proposals is that “all the phenomena of the mind, from perception to consciousness, originated from an unholy microscopic alliance between hungry swimming killer bacteria and their potential archaebacterial victims. The hungry killers were extraordinarily fast swimming, skinny bacteria called spirochetes. These active bacteria are relatives of the spirochetes of today that are associated with the venereal disease that, in prolonged and serious cases, infects the brain: the treponemes of syphilis. The fatter, slow-moving archaebacteria incorporated their fast-
moving would-be killers into their bodies. The archaebacteria survived, continuing to be infected by the spirochetes. The odd couple survived. The archaebacteria were changed: they were made more motile, but not killed by their attackers” (51). In this example, the spiral-shaped parasitic bacteria described by Margulis was absorbed by a larger spiral, that of recursivity. Recursive operations in complex systems reproduce their emergent properties by establishing constraints that affect the probability distributions of their component parts. In the ancient and sacred Erewhonian text The Book of Machines, the anonymous author suggests that machines might eventually take the dominant position in society by producing environmental constraints that control human behaviour in ways that benefit the reproduction of more complex machines: “Who shall say that a man does see or hear? He is such a hive and swarm of parasites that it is doubtful whether his body is not more theirs than his, and whether he is anything but another kind of ant-heap after all. May not man himself become a sort of parasite upon the machines? An affectionate machine-tickling
aphid?” (1872, 232). This passage was written as a warning to the Erewhonian people to be cautious of the technological ecosystem that they were constructing all around them. The warning suggests that a vast enough assemblage of technological subsystems might easily give rise to emergent properties – causal agents arising out of complex relations of technological assemblages – capable of perceiving their environment meaningfully and subsequently constraining their constituent parts, both human and machine alike. The prophet foresees how such a transformation would have humanity absorbed into the autopoietic activities of technological systems. In other words, the author warns of the possibility that humans could become stuck in a position where the reproduction of certain technological activities would be their sole purpose in life. Later in the text the author states: We are misled by considering any complicated machine as a single thing; in truth it is a city or society, each member of which was bred truly after its kind. We see a machine as a whole, we call it by a name and individualize it; we look at our own limbs, and know that the
combination forms an individual which springs from a single center of reproductive action; we therefor assume that there can be no reproductive action which does not arise from a single center; but this assumption is unscientific, and the bare fact that no vapor-engine was ever made entirely by another, or two others, of its own kind, is not sufficient to warrant us in saying that vapor-engines have no reproductive system. The truth is that each part of every vapor-engine is bred by its own special breeders, whose function it is to breed that part, and that only, while the combination of the parts into a whole forms another department of the mechanical reproductive system, which is at present exceedingly complex and difficult to see in its entirety. Complex now, but how much simpler and more intelligibly organized may it not become in another hundred thousand yea rs? Or in twenty thousand? For humans at present believe that their interests lie in that direction; they spend an incalculable amount of labour and time and thought in making machines breed always better and better […] It must always be remembered that the human b ody is what it is through
having been molded into its present shape by the chances and changes of many millions of years, but that its organization never advanced with anything like the rapidity with which that of the machines is advancing. Were the Erewhonian prophet ever to catch a glimpse of the technological communication systems within which present societies have embedded themselves and which they are increasingly constrained to reproduce, the prophet would likely be relieved that his warnings prevented Erewhonian society from encountering a similar fate. The spiral form evoked by Hui is significant because it suggests that, by operating in recursive loops, a system continually moves into higher dimensions of being in order to observe itself in relation to its environment. This suggests that self-organizing systems reproduce their own boundaries by moving outward into a dimension of reality that exceeds the limits of the reality they observe. Recursivity, then, is a process of becoming that operates in a realm of observation, and which moves outward in the very direction from which contingency enters into the world. Hui identifies the necessity of contingency in the
becoming of complex systems, which I interpret as meaning that contingency and recursivity are two different ways of looking at the foundational dimension of reality: observation. Image taken from A Primer of Higher Space (1913) by Claude Bragdon It is worth noting that the spiral form is identified by José Ortega y Gasset as the formal characteristic of philosophizing, too (1964, 71). As such, philosophy orients the becoming of a social system, where the constituent parts of the system (the people) are causally affected (constrained) by the observations of the emergent whole (the society). “Life”, claims Ortega y Gasset, “cannot avoid philosophizing” (74). He later proposes that the philosophical impulse inherent in all human beings is uniquely “disturbed” by the reality it encounters: “Within the biological and utilitarian human there is another human, daring and sportive, who, rather than making life easy by exploiting the real, complicates it by replacing the world’s tranquility with the restlessness of problems. This basic leaning toward theory on the part of the human being we find to have an ultimate fact in the cosmos […] Do not tell yourselves that
it is necessity or some practical problem which obliges us to pose theoretic problems to ourselves” (82-82). Here Ortega y Gasset is concerned with the unavoidable human tendency to generate ever-more complex arrangements of information in the world in spite of their general irrelevance to the survival of the biological human body. In an earlier iteration of this spiraling philosophical inquiry, Ortega y Gasset circles his topic by evoking Plato’s “supercelestial region”, where the ancient Greek philosopher identified the existence of Ideas as originating “outside the temporal world” (23). This model of reality, according to Ortega y Gasset, “allows us to represent our temporal world to ourselves as a sphere surrounded by another circumference having a different ontological atmosphere where live the nontemporal truths, indifferent to time” (23). Locating ideas outside the temporality of the material world separates them from the causal order of matter. Thus. in this metaphysical framework ideas do not interact causally with physical bodies. “Thought, then, is a point where two worlds, antagonistic in comparison, come together”, states Ortega y Gasset (21).
If thought is the opening to the Temporal Temple through which Ideas randomly break in, do the sacrificial vessels have any other purpose than to seduce the Supercelestial Leopards? Plato’s metaphysical dualism establishes two separate causal realities that are somehow unified in the unique operations of human thought, where physical reality is chaotic and everchanging while the transcendent realm of Ideas is fixed and immutable. Recalling the irreversible time proposed by Prigogine and Stengers in their notion of dissipative structures, we can see how the latter model of reality is incompatible with the Platonic theory of Forms on the basis that dissipative structures emerge through a truly novel unfolding of reality along an undetermined and irreversible course. The idea of pure informational forms existing outside of time as a telos toward which the material world is drawn undermines the notion of becoming that is so central to Prigogine’s approach to physics (Bohm, 1987, 675). Somewhere in between these two models there is a description of reality that stays true to novelty arising out of chance while still affording those novel structures a chance to
be preserved somewhere in the memory of the cosmos; sustained as sources of meaning to which the world can circle back and be in-formed. A causal model like that would reconcile the irreversibility of complex becoming with a second order of causality that spirals into itself, returning to previous forms sustained in its memory and recalling them through a dimension of difference. The linear domain of entropic causality gives rise to contingencies which trigger meaningful responses that are pulled from the memory of previous forms. In other words, drawing from this pseudo-celestial memory field in response to material contingency brings into existence patterns which are based on some previously existent form, but which emerges again as necessarily different by virtue of the fact that it has meaning in relation to previous iterations of itself (it exists in time). Regarding Plato’s supercelestial region, Ortega y Gasset observes: “note that at a certain instant, one of those truths, the law of gravitation, filtered down from that other world into our own, as if taking advantage of the crevice which widened and let it pass” (23). The author goes on to question
why that single truth was able to pass through into the material world and manifest itself, however imperfectly, in materially mediated patterns of information such as text and speech? “Why was it not thought of before or afterwards? Why was its discoverer not someone else?” (24). If we believe the infamous tale of the apple falling randomly next to Newton as he sat pondering the world around him (an inescapable human impulse according to OyG), perhaps it truly was that very particular contingent event which sprang forth from the environment to create the potential for new meaning to emerge. Or, better yet, the falling apple was the other side of the same reality that gave rise to the theory of gravitation, both phenomena occurring simultaneously in distinct temporal modes. Bohm reminds us that “any change of meaning is a change of soma, and any change of soma is a change of meaning” (163). In which case, this story is made sensible by introducing the moneky as a meta-causal domain within which mind and matter, or significance and soma, unfold as an entangled unity, distinct in causal logic by unified in the immanence of observation. Is that
perhaps why the story of the apple falling on Newton’s head feels so satisfying? Because it unifies these two distinct causal phenomena as two ways of understanding one singular reality, weaving the supercelestial region into the immanent fabric of material reality? Perhaps because it mythologizes the necessary presence of contingency in the emergence of new patterns of meaningful information to become manifest in lived experience. If so, I suggest that it was within the moneky that the causal domain of material force (the falling apple) and the emergence of a new pattern of information in the causal domain of meaning (Newton’s Law of Universal Gravitation) unfolded together as a single entangled reality. The falling apple arose out of linear time in the thermodynamic causal domain, and, when apprehended at the level of meaning by emergent properties, the apple triggered a response drawn from the always-shifting pseudo-celestial domain: the cosmic memory field where novel forms are stored as information in states that are neither fixed nor immutable. Diferrence Makes Difference “The territory decays, all the corners grow round, while the
map becomes ever more detailed and sound” Linda Fox, Force and Difference: Two Movements, One Reality In my study of the moneky, I employ second-order cybernetics – the science of observing systems rather than observable systems – to establish an analysis at the relational level, where meaning and matter can be understood as two distinct but inseparable poles of a singular process of reality observing itself. In doing so, I am drawing on Gregory Bateson’s two-part causal model that establishes how the physical / material / somatic world differs causally from the world of difference / meaning / significance. In his essay Form, Substance and Difference, Bateson borrows a metaphysical distinction from Carl Jung which the latter expresses using the Gnostic terms “Pleroma” and “Creatura” (Bateson, 456). Bateson goes on to apply these terms within a cybernetic framework to distinguish the domain of force from that of difference. He characterizes difference as the essential quality of a “map” which emerges out of its relation to a “territory” (Bateson, 457). Difference, then, is what gets from the territory onto the map. Returning to the application of
Jung’s Gnostic vocabulary, Bateson identifies the “Pleroma” as the territory, “the world in which events are caused by forces and impacts and in which there are no ‘distinctions’” (456). The “Creatura”, on the other hand, is identified as the domain of mapped experience, where “effects are brought about precisely by difference” (456). These two domains of reality form complexly interwoven circuits that loop “news of a difference” back out as organizations of thermodynamic force. They can be distinguished from each other by identifying their energetic relations to the message in the loop: the Pleroma exists as a territory of transformations derived from thermodynamic processes that move generally toward more probable states of distribution, and within these processes difference generates no effects, all interactions are “energized […] from ‘behind’”; the Creatura, in distinction, is a world of effects brou ght about by differences as they enter a system through a sense organ and trigger energetic responses powered by the system’s internal metabolic processes (B ateson, 456). To distinguish these two modes of transformation using more common imagery,
Bateson characterizes the Pleroma by describing the interaction between two billiard balls, where all the energy that sends a stationary billiard ball into motion is attributed to an external force, namely, the impact of a moving billiard ball. This is compared with the example of kicking a dog (something I’m confident Bateson would never have actually done), where the force of the kick is less causally significant than its meaning, which the dog transforms into “news of a difference” that , once entered into the dog’s neural pathways, activates an internal energy source (the stored metabolization of dog food) to energize the dog as it flees from the scene (Bateson, 452). This looping process between Pleroma and Creatura gives rise to stable relations between operationally distinct thermodynamic systems whose structures include: sense organs capable of perceiving difference at varying levels in the world and responding to such difference with internally generated and energized state formations; coupled environments which absorb those state changes through their own process of perception followed by a reciprocal looping of difference and force (Matruana
and Varela, 71). As I’ve pointed to already in the present essay, David Bohm describes this looping between force and difference similarly, using soma in place of Pleroma and significance in place of Creatura: “Now we have in this process […] three aspects: soma and significance and an energy source which carries the significance of soma to a subtler level and gives rise to a backward movement in which the significance acts on the soma” (174). Out of this circular dynamic emerges a larger cognitive process that extends beyond the boundaries of living systems to include aspects of the environment(s) within which they are coupled. Bateson’s essential picture of the cybernetic loop is that Creatura is the world seen as mind, with the “news of a difference” that travels the circuit described above considered to be the basic unit of ideation (459). The Pleroma, then, is both the cause and the effect of the Creatura, since it is the initial source of irritation that gave rise to mapped difference as well as the manifestation of that same mental map looped back into the world as thermodynamic state changes. In other words, within the Creatura occurs the mapping of
the Pleroma through the perception of difference as input, and the internally generated production of physical (re)organization as output; the form of the latter corresponding to the former in a way that is predetermined by the “ontogeny” of the observing system (Maturana and Varela, 75). Negentropy of Difference “The brain is negentropic, the life of the universe” Philip K Dick, The Exegesis of Philip K Dick [I SEE THINGS LIKE THIS:] Bateson’s Pleroma is characterized by an entropic tendency to move toward more probable thermodynamic states, where energy is increasingly spread out over time. The Creatura, on the other hand, operates negentropically, with a tendency for difference to create more difference in less probable states. This characteristic of the Creatura, which I refer to as Negentropy of Difference, is the tendency for difference to cluster increasingly into more complex and less likely states. As such, the output of living systems organizes the world with a drive for difference to be preserved in the environment: reproducing forms, making the territory more like the map, and thereby triggering feedback loops of difference production.
For example, the dissipative structures described by Prigogine and Stengers will reorganize aspects of their environment in order to maintain their own boundaries, and the more complex their operations become the more sensitive they are to changes in the environment (Sagan, 100). An example of dissipative structures as oscillatory chemical reactions called the Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction. Image taken from: Tiezzi, E, et al.“Dissipative structures in nature and human systems” WIT Transactions on Ecology and the Environment, Vol 114. WIT Press, 2008. P. 294 Transformations in their environment are taken to be fundamentally entropic, since they consume order and spit back out the unusable bones of entropy. However, I claim their autopoietic activities form traces in the world that leave behind information corresponding to their lived experience, which can register meaningfully with other systems and thus trigger more difference. In other words, dissipative structures restructure their environments into more complex, less probable patterns of information as difference, particularly in their ability to “undergo bifurcations, separating to new, perhaps
higher-energy meta-stable energy regimes (Sagan, 100). Living systems themselves can be thought of as patterns of information that beget information, precisely through their ability to stabilize configurations of matter to form constraints which expand the phase space of the system: “potential information is created because additional alternatives suddenly become available” (Juarrero 515). As stated by Alvero Moreno and Matteo Mossio in their comprehensive text Biological Autonomy (2015): “In this view, the environment becomes a world full of significance: facts that from the outside may appear just as purely physical or chemical develop into positive, negative, or neutral influences on the system, depending on whether they contribute to, hinder or have no effect on the maintenance of its dynamic identity. Even the simplest living organism creates a set of preferential partitions of the world, converting interactions with their surrounding media into elementary values[…] autonomy implies a meaningful relation with the environment” (xxix). In this quote we can see that Moreno and Mossio identify a causal domain that is operationally distinct from
that of the “purely physical or chemical” in order to observe the negentropic effects (movement toward less probable states) that meaning has on not o nly living systems, but, according to Bohm, aspects of reality at every level. For Bohm, the causal operations of meaning are enfolded indefinitely into material structures and are not just limited causally to the activity of biological organisms (162). Bohm identifies one of the most immediately observable instances where meaning corresponds to transformations in matter in the blood distribution of the human brain (178), where he notes that “every time you think, the blood distribution all over the brain changes; every emotion changes it […] there is also a tremendous connection with the heartbeat and the chemical constitution of the blood” (178). Recent studies into the use of psychedelic drugs focus similarly on the distribution of blood in the brain to analyze how new experiences of meaning are made possible by chemically altered brain states (Carhart-Harris et al.). The “Entropic Brain” theory proposes that the modelling function of the brain can be affected by psychedelic drug use in such a way that
redistributes blood flow into more probable (entropic) states throughout the brain, which, roughly speaking, dissolves familiar correspondences that the brain might have previously established through a process of modelling familiar environments (Carhart-Harris et al.). As such, the entropic brain experiences a loss of familiarity with its environment and perceives it with less expectation than would normally be established by the modelling function of blood distribution in the brain. Here we can see how the characterization of entropy is given to the brain when the blood distribution of more spread out, and not clustered in unlikely patterns. But, the effect this entropic physical state has on meaning is to observe the environment with less expectation and more surprise. Here, then, is an example of how the two causal domains of soma and significance, or Pleroma and Creatura respectively, can be understood as flowing in different directions through one shared reality. The psychedelic experience is one where meaning arises in high orders of improbability and complexity alongside less organized, more probable physical brain states. Returning to Gregory
Bateson’s Creatura / Pleroma distinction, Bateson asserts that “systems operate to create difference”, and that “any such difference is ‘negative entropy’” (457). The reality that emerges out of the relation between the Pleroma and Creatura is one of ongoing creativity, since the tendency for the Pleroma to flow toward more probable thermodynamic states (entropy) offers a reciprocal process of transformation by which negentropic patterns of difference that originate in the Creatura. The latter establish themselves as meaningful physical structures in the Pleroma, where their forms are destabilized by the movement of force away from improbable energy gradients. In other words, meaning continually falls apart, degrades, and decays, which creates noise for the interpretation of new meaning. Living systems emerge autopoietically out of thermodynamic environments as spontaneous outpourings of negentropic organization into thermodynamic causal environments. The ir struggle is to maintain order in the face of a world that is constantly falling apart, and their joy is to face a world that is constantly falling apart from a place of order. As has been established,
the moneky identifies the causal bridge between the two domains of causality described by Bateson: Pleroma and Creatura. By bridging these causal domains, the moneky allows for the rich complex world we live in to evolve according to the transformations of self-organizing systems, where complex patterns of information can actualize themselves as material structures and then be subject to entropic degradation. Processes of material disorganization create new configurations of matter that give rise to novel interpretations of meaning in the domain of information; the recursive interplay of these two causal processes sustains a world of ongoing transformation and interpretation. What a strange delight to be a part of it! G Spencer Brown enchantingly describes the recursive mechanism at the fundamental level of the cosmos: “Thus, we cannot escape the fact that the world we know is constructed in order to see itself. This is indeed amazing. Not so much in view of what it sees, although this may appear fantastic enough, but in respect of the fact that it can see at all. But in order to do so, evidently it must first cut itself up into at least one state which sees,
and at least one other state which is seen” (105). Brown’s strange evocation of a universe constructed in order to see itself flickers delicately like the image of a crashing wave reflected in a child’s eyes. The moneky didn’t always exist though. There was a time when meaning never interacted with the physical world, and vice versa. This was a time that was devoid of time (since the registration of time requires meaningful encounters with matter). So where did it the moneky come from? To answer this question I turn to the Gnostic interpretation of Genesis, which articulates the origins of the moneky appropriately through paradox. Paradox is needed to evoke the origins of the moneky because it is only through paradox that material organizations of meaning fold back on themselves to create informational loops, where the information being communicated cannot be integrated into its context meaningfully and thus draws attention to the immanence of its material form. For example, the sentence “this sentence is false” is paradoxical because, if it is integrated into its context as being true, it becomes false, and thus loops back into the world as new difference.
On the other hand, if it taken as false, then it simultaneously becomes true and sustains itself again as a closed loop of difference that neither produces more information nor does it get integrated into its context. Either way, the information doesn’t coherently transform into corresponding somatic states. Paradox, then, allows observers to experience the distinctiveness of those two causal domains that are unified by the moneky: force and difference. More generally, I claim that what is experienced through encounters with paradox is the observation of observing. In the next section we will look at how the observation of observation is central to the Gnostic story of Genesis, and the phenomenon of Gnosis in general. Observing Genesis “This theology is the only true one, but it has no content” Arthur Schopenhauer (as quotes by Borges in From Someone to No One) Gnosticism is a pre-Christian theology that draws loosely on Platonic philosophy and is characterized by the rejection of an illusory world (Smith 2). The seemingly dualistic metaphysics found in Gnosticism divides reality into the spirit realm and the material realm - the real world and the
illusory world, respectively. However, a more complex understanding of Gnostic metaphysics might find that the distinction between matter and spirit is more fundamentally nested within a singular reality, where matter and spirit are seen to be enfolded into a more fundamental field of being: observation. The Gnostic metaphysics that I am presenting here is an undivided, immanent reality that becomes a duality only through (within) observation. It is within observation that figure / ground relations can exist, which together form the basic unit of difference as information. The difference between a figure and its ground is the smallest amount of information there is. “The introduction of a mark – whether a stroke of paint, a graphite line, a value shift, or a chisel mark – decreases the uniformity of [a] surface by introducing differential structure, such as a figure-ground relationship” (Hoelscher 76). It is also within observation that the undifferentiated world of force exists as a ground against which difference is a sensible figure. But it would be false to assume that this means that entropic causal reality is primary and that negentropic causal activity emerges
within an entropic context as secondary. The figure is not created by the ground. They produce one another through a mutually dependent and relational existence, much like emergent properties and their constituent parts do. Thus, in the Gnostic creation story I interpret that neither the spirit realm or the material world are primary, since they mutually produce one another within a field of observing. A common practice in Gnostic mythologizing is known as “inverse exegesis”, which generally operates by reinterpreting the myths of other religions through a framework of value reversals and heretical meta-narratives (Smith, 60). At once this practice, like that of steganography, operates through meta-difference, where the myth being interpreted is a source of difference that gives rise to an even higher order of difference, and thus more information, based on the real / illusory distinction that is used to re-interpret the story. Early Gnostics approached myth as a dynamic process of revision and interrogation rather than a fixed description of reality. For this reason, paradox was a powerful tool of Gnostic myth, allowing a myth to act “at once as the veil over
Truth, and as the way whereby Truth may be unveiled” (Hoeller, 101). An example of inverse exegetic mythologizing can be found in the Gnostic retelling of the Book of Genesis. In this version of the Genesis story there is a preface that tells of an “immeasurable, ineffable, unknowable, unnameable” Godhead that cannot be described, but that can nevertheless give rise to difference (Smith, 14-15). Here the Gnostics begin their creation story by narrativizing the process by which any attempt to observe an absence of distinction will have already created a distinction in its establishment of an observing state; a “state which sees” (Brown, 105). This distinction will inevitably produce more of itself in the form of further distinctions. As such, the Godhead in the Gnostic preface to Genesis, unfolding difference from its undifferentiated core as the story progresses, reveals itself to be made up of various qualities. These different qualitites, “like Mind, Silence, Depth, Love”, are identified as aeons (Smith, 15). The initial aeons give rise to further distinctions described as younger aeons, the last of which is named Sophia, meaning “wisdom” in Greek. Sophia,
being the embodiment of the distinction of wisdom, simultaneously gives rise to wisdom’s opposite quality: curiosity. Curiosity leads her to wander away from the fullness of the Godhead: a state of undifferentiated spirit called the Pleroma. This is the first evocation of paradox in the Gnostic creation story, as it is Sophia’s curiosity about the Godhead itself that causes it to become less accessible to her, or more precisely, in the act of creating a distinction through observation, Sophia completes a circuit through which meaning can loop back into the somatic world as a transformation of the somatic state (Bohm, 165-67) and make that distinction manifest in the world. Thus, in an attempt to know the fullness of the Pleroma, Sophia gets lost in a cascade of distinctions and falls away from the spiritual realm into the material world, where she is impregnated by the material world. Sophia gives birth to the Demiurge, a being that knows nothing of the Godhead from which his mother originally emerged. The Demiurge, in his naïve belief that he himself is the one and only God, creates the material world and declares it good (Smith, 15). In other words, the
cosmos produces that which is responsible for the production of the cosmos. Using this Gnostic cosmogony to situate the causality of force and difference we can equate the false realm of material reality to the Creatura and the true realm of spirit to the Pleroma. Entropy, then, cannot be assumed to be the background against which life emerges as an unlikely anomaly, because Entropy of Force which characterizes the Pleroma cannot be supposed to precede Negentropy of Difference in the Creatura. Drawing on the logic of the Gnostic interpretation of Genesis to consider this claim further, I argue that the Gnostic creation myth that prefaces the Old Testament Genesis is an articulation of the paradoxical nature of the causal relationship between force and difference. There is no Pleroma until it observes itself through difference, yet there is no Creatura until the appropriate thermodynamic conditions give rise to sense organs capable of observing difference. This paradoxical description of force and difference, which resembles the top-down causality described earlier by Juarrero, unifies the spirit / matter distinction of metaphysical dualism within a monistic
reality that Gnostic metaphysics shares with that of second-order cybernetics: All is observing. (Still don’t believe it? Read this: “While sunlight and moisture on their own may not compel attention, when they relate in a certain way in the presence of an observer, the result is the strange and alluring experience of a rainbow” (Hoelscher, 17)). Generating Observation “Autopoietic explanatory models are not compatible with the current epistemological framework of academic institutions, for the simple reason that institutional knowledge still expects all of its claims to arise out of clearly identifiable chains of causality”. Dave Biddle, The Above Quote In the Gnostic creation story, we can identify a mythological articulation of autopoiesis as the basis for the existence of reality’s material dimension: “the reproduction of [illusory material] from outcomes of [illusory material]” (Luhmann, 2000, 83). The Gnostic preface to Genesis leaves off at the self-organization of a material cosmos emerging from a linear chain of irreversible proliferation of difference, the latter being represented in the ubiquitous fall from grace. The strange circular causality used to
describe the existence of physical reality as both the father and son, traps the reader in an illusory prison, where the Old Testament continues the story, as if in a shift of perspective to the POV of the demiurge, at the moment when God creates Heaven and Earth and declares it good. Thus, the inclusion of the preceding Gnostic narrative of the true Godhead serves to reverse any truth claims made by the Book of Genesis: the result of which is that the Garden of Eden is considered a prison for Adam and Eve (who have each been secretly endowed with a single spark of divine light from the Pleroma in order to animate their otherwise lifeless bodies); The snake becomes a saviour who is sent as an agent of the Godhead to free Adam and Eve from their prison of illusory reality; Eve’s willingness to trust the snake grants her hero status in this telling of Genesis; and the act of eating the apple is the metaphorical moment of Gnosis, where the illusory nature of their world is revealed to Eve and Adam as falsely fragmented against a backdrop of undifferentiated fullness that is the Pleroma. However, what this story reveals to us is that, to witness the figure / ground
of reality as such, one must construct a meta-ground within which to contain it: observation. In this particular case of inverse exegesis, we can make the claim that Gnosticism attempts to offer a mythological articulation of second order observation, by enfolding into its narrative structure an “outside” to the story, where the Godhead is always observing from a space that is characteristically “unmarked” (Luhmann, 2000, 119). The Godhead stands for the necessary existence of the unobservable in any act of observation. Quoting Luhmann’s paradoxical articulation of this claim, "Reality is what one does not perceive when one perceives it."(2002, 145). Sophia’s fall from the Pleroma, then, stands as a representation of any act of observation. Quoting Luhmann again: “Observations use distinctions to describe something (and nothing else). Observing is […] a highly complex operation which separates off what it is observing from what it is not observing with the aid of a distinction; and what it is not observing is always also the operation of observing itself” (2000, 95). We the observers of the creation myth are precisely what set it into motion: our
observation of the Pleroma implicates us as the creators of a distinction (a boundary around an object of unbroken wholeness, of which we as observers are necessarily excluded). This initial distinction then cascades toward further states of distinction, as it is the natural tendency for difference to move toward increasing states of improbability (Biddle, 11). The relation between difference and the undifferentiated, the latter being what Gregory Bateson characterizes as “thermodynamic force”, is foundational to any act of observation (Bateson, 456). The presence of paradox in Gnostic mythologizing effectively collapses the dualistic relation between fullness and fragmentation, or substance and form, to reveal a single phenomenon at the ground level of reality: observation. Oh Time Thy Pyramids “In the vast Library there are no two identical books… the Library is total… its shelves register all the possible combinations of the twenty-odd orthographical symbols” Anonymous Librarian in Babel An important character in Gnostic mythology is the “Archon”, a pluriform agent of the Demiurge – basically a bureaucratic figure in the material world whose
function is to enforce rules and keep people engaged with material tasks for the purpose of distracting them from having experiences of Gnosis (Hoeller, 106). In Niklas Luhmann’s social systems theory, subsystems such as the political system, the economic system, the mass media system, etc., all function like modern Archons, and all do so by deceptively engaging individuals on the basis that they can observe their reality through the communicative processes of their operations. To this end, the evolution of digital media technology has established an environment wherein manifestations of difference do not quickly decay according to the entropic tendency to move toward more probable states; a situation that is increasingly similar to the dynamics between information and matter that is described in The Library of Babel (Borges, 1962, 51). In contemporary digital media environments, conspiracy theorists use inverse exegesis to establish value reversals through which to reinterpret media and create more information that will loop back into the world of force in new ways, giving rise to new patterns of activity. However, since the concept of Negentropy
of Difference suggests that difference tends to organize itself in less probable structures of meaning, the production not only of conspiracy theory but theory per se can be situated within information’s negentropic tendency. The theoretical claim that is implicit in the argument presented in the present paper is that any experience of meaning can be causally explained by Negentropy of Difference as a tendency for information to complexify indefinitely – just as in The Library of Babel we can say that any experience of meaning (relegated by Borges to familiar organizations of symbols in books) can be causally explained by the existence of infinite books containing every random assortment of letters. In our world, then, it follows that every theoretical description of reality can and does exist (if only latently) in the infinite potentiality of the moneky, but that there is some regulatory disorganizing process (thermodynamic entropy) by which only certain meanings get reproduced in the physical world as stable meaning structures. For example, Borges’ brilliant achievement in The Library of Babel is in allowing the story to simultaneously bring itself into and
out of meaningful existence through the relation between its form and content, which, as text, makes implicit the re-entry of the form of the story back into the world that the story is describing. The world that it describes abstracts text to the point that it is virtually all that exists as a medium for meaning, disregarding a few supplemental artifacts which seem to be observable strictly for their function. By that I mean that the physical world seems to be fixed and static, not subject to entropic decay, an observation that can be identified in the fact that light bulbs never go out, and the physical structures of the bookshelves and all other aspects of the hexagons do not fall apart unless actively destroyed by their inhabitants (51). The paradox of the story comes when the story itself is implicitly re-entered back into the world it describes and re-emerges in the context of infinite variations of itself, all equally meaningless. Similarly, the theory of Negentropy of Difference (this essay) resolves itself in such a way that, when it is re-entered into itself as content for analysis, it can only be understood as the manifestation of the tendency for difference to move toward
maximum improbability. In other words, if it is taken as true that difference does in fact move toward less probable states in the world, then we can say that the theory itself is untrue on the basis that it is meaningless: Like the “total book” that is speculated about in The Library of Babel (Borges, 56), the theory of Negentropy of Difference renders all production of meaning to be contingent and arbitrary on the basis that all possible descriptions are inevitable outcomes of Negentropy of Difference. On the other hand, in order to disprove the theory of Negentropic Difference we would have to disprove the premise that difference, as defined by the Creatura, tends to produce less-probable structures of meaning. To do so would require the employment of the theory itself in order to claim that Negentropy of Difference is a false co ncept that has no relation to the territory of the real world , but which has arisen purely out of the tendency for d escriptions of the world to produce more descriptions whether or not they relate to the true state of reality (Negentrop y of Difference). In other words, we would have to employ the theory as true in order to prove its
falseness. Any other way of refuting the premise upon which this theory rests would only take us closer to that final negentropic state (a state that I’m tempted to call “Idea Death”, or “Ideath” for short) and would thus do nothing but bring itself closer to meaninglessness. One could, however, ask one simple question that strikes at the heart of all metaphysical claims: if an articulation of the most basic and irreducible aspect of reality is to be considered true, as in, there are no further distinctions that can be made at this level of description, then who can observe it? Epilogue “What matters is not whether one’s beliefs are true or not, but that one truly lives as though they were!” Everyone, Eventually I didn’t write this, and I’m sorry if its meaning is troubling to you. Every time I finished typing out a sentence (I still look at my fingers while typing) I would look up at the screen and see unfamiliar passages. Incidentally I’ve also had the same dream every night since I began writing this essay. It starts from my point of view: I am sitting on the beach; the waves are massive but completely silent. When I look out at them my heart fills with sublime terror.
But then the perspective in the dream abruptly shifts so that I’m looking at myself in profile as I gaze out at the ocean. My face is covered in warm sunlight and the air is still and peaceful. I’m a young boy in the dream. Every so often the perspective shifts between my point of view, looking out at the ocean, and the one that reveals a young version of myself in profile. Each couplet is identical to the previous one. After several changes back and forth between perspectives – maybe six or seven – I return to the image of the crashing waves to find it noticeably less intense. The waves seem the same size, but they are no longer frightening, because they appear ordered to me, as though I could predict every detail of how they will break onto the shore. Then, when it cuts back to the profile, my younger self is looking directly back into the dream camera. A reflection of the waves crashing is still visible in my youthful eyes. The reflection fades away as I lean in closer to the dream camera. Then, in an eight-year-old voice, I whisper the following words:
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