Independent scholar · practitioner · thermodynamics, cybernetics & political economy
The foundations
Two entropies, two cornerstones.
My research interest is the political economy of sustainability, or homeostasis in a system kept far from equilibrium by a constant supply of solar radiation, and how the polycrisis and metacrisis manifest as evidence of the challenges maintaining homeostasis for all humanity (a perspective inspired by Buckminster Fuller). This research is informed by energy, material, and financial flows, and by cybernetic regulation.
“What an organism feeds upon is negative entropy.”— Erwin Schrödinger, What is Life?, 1944
“You should call it entropy, for two reasons. In the first place your uncertainty function has been used in statistical mechanics under that name … In the second place, and more important, no one knows what entropy really is, so in a debate you will always have the advantage.”— John von Neumann to Claude Shannon (recounted in Tribus & McIrvine, 1971)
1844–1906Ludwig Boltzmann
“The struggle for existence … is a struggle for entropy.”
S = k log W
thermodynamic entropy
1916–2001Claude Shannon
“The fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing … a message selected at another point.”
H = −Σ pᵢ log pᵢ
information entropy
1880–1949Alfred J. Lotka
“Natural selection tends to make the energy flux through the system a maximum.”
dE/dt → max
maximum power
1903–1972W. Ross Ashby
“Only variety can destroy variety.”
H(R) ≥ H(D) − H(E)
requisite variety
“The teaching must, I think, commence with a study of evolution, natural selection, and homeostasis.”— W. Ross Ashby, Cybernetics Today and its Future Contribution to the Engineering Sciences, 1961
The programme
Lotka’s World Engine to today’s AI.
It starts with Lotka’s World Engine (1925) and runs to today’s AI through Cybernetics, in pursuit of a political economy of sustainability in a complex evolving system.
Ontology, epistemology, axiology
What is, what can be known and what is valued pull against each other, and the tension is the mechanism. Ashby's system is a list of variables the observer chose, so the partition comes first. The dot is the model the three produce for now. It moves as they do and never rests.
Writing