Arthur Eddington Quote of the Day
From his The Nature of the Physical World (1929: 74), book form of his 1927 Gifford Lectures.
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Do you think that Eddington would have preferred ontologies based on extinction to those premised on differentiation?
Ummm, not sure what you precisely have in mind here. Eddington was quite an ‘old school’ scientist, and in the foreword to this book he makes very clear that it is only with some embrasassment that he puts forward –in print– ‘philosophical’ treatments of physics. He claims to have been deeply influenced by General Relativity, and that’s probably as far as his ‘ontology’ goes. Just a guess.
The only thing that seems to fly in the face of the second law of thermodynamics is life. This should give us pause…
Oh, I was thinking that differentiation is negentropic, whereas the Second Law asserts that the universe tends inexorably in the direction of loss of differentiation. In particular I was wondering about Deleuze, for whom difference is a key force. It turns out that Deleuze acknowledged that he was flying in the face of scientific opinion. In Difference and Repetition he argued that the Second Law is illusory, citing some unknown “expert” by the name of Leon Selme as supporting evidence. I suppose Deleuze would support the Necromancer’s position: there’s some primal force of differentiation operating in the universe that counteracts or offsets the scientifically established inevitable tendency toward entropy. In contrast I think of Brassier. I acknowledge that I don’t understand his position very well, but Brassier seems to regard the Second Law as foundational. Assuming that the universe will surely wind down to total extinction, maximum entropy, total loss of differentiation, what can be said about the real? So I was thinking that, per Eddington, Deleuze would collapse into “deepest humiliation” whereas Brassier could hope to avoid that sad fate.
As you both mention this quickly gets into the realm of ontology. I particularly like the way John puts it. This question of the “consequences” of the law of thermodynamics only gets interesting when you leave science well behind. Deleuze’s difference is not so removed from Bergson’s duration, in the sense that it is fundamentally dependent on time. Is time more fundamental, then, than the second law of thermodynamics? Heck, is time the second law of thermodynamics?
Put this way, it doesn’t seem so law-like. Epistemological but not ontological.
And we are suddenly all the way back almost a hundred years in the philosophy of science…Well, 83 years.
How time flies…
John, yeah now I see what you mean. Yes, I guess that it is correct to say that Brassier’s argument somewhat depends on entropy at work. After all, the scientific descriptions of the end of the universe that he gives take for granted the second law (and the expansion of the univese/system). So yes, the endgame would be a loss of differentiation (even though: the endgame is actually nihil. If I would say that in the ‘theological full being’ there is a lack of difference, I don’t know if i would speak in the same way about emptiness/nothingness).
As for the problem of difference, it is hard to speculate about that but I would say (and this counts as a reply to Necromancer as well) that we can avoid clashes as long as we consider that the Deleuzian scientific ‘framework’ (if we can call it that) is a biological-organic one. And indeed, one of the basic definitions of a living thing is a system which reduces its internal etropy (=struggles for negentropy) at the expense of the external system (via food and waste disposal for example). The universe as a whole does increase its entropy (and yes, that is a definition of time, or at least an explaination of why the arrow of time has a direction) but there are pockets of negentropy (living beings) which struggle to defy this process. Of course, as far as we know, living things eventually die. So it is only a doomed resistence.