LoopDeLoopTest

[for Bateson] Furthermore, the other theories are deficient to the extent that they have inadequately theorised negentropy. For instance, the vitalistic “life force” at the heart of Henri Bergson’s “creative ecology”, or the “psychic energy” which drives the forces within Sigmund Freud’s world of the sub-conscious, falter at the point where the relation between information and energy cannot be accounted for. It is at this point that we fall back into terms which appear somewhat metaphysical and vitalistic. The entelechies of the life force, psychic energy, dynamic physiology, the Id, the Ego and Superego proliferate in the absence of the explanation provided by (negative) entropy. Bateson often takes time to re-formulate and update such constructs in terms of negentropy, as he does with Freud in Communication: The Social Matrix of Society (1951). For Bateson the link between energy with information provides a coherent materialist perspective which was previously lacking. For Bateson, as his career progresses, negentropy becomes a benevolent lens through which to view a number of theories which intuited a principle which could not be adequately articulated before the advent of the cybernetic revolution.

The conditions for the reception of negentropy had been well established well in advance of cybernetics. Clark Maxwell had imagined a negentropic demon who favoured particularly energetic particles. The concept close to negative entropy had been present in the field of biology for some time. The novelist and speculative theorist Samuel Butler used the metaphor of a loaded dice to argue that nature seemed to roll in favour of order as a matter of course. (chapter 1); the pragmatist William James had noted that nature seemed to be “paying out of its own pocket”; Claude Bernard had conceived of the milieu intérieur, which described equilibrium within biological organisms in 1854. The milieu intérieur “is that which assured the maintenance, within the internal environment, of all the conditions necessary for the life of the elements.” This process was adapted to the principle of homeostasis by Walter Cannon in 1926.12

Gregory Bateson’s father, William Bateson, the founder (with Gregor Mendel) of modern genetics also attempted to reconcile the apparent proliferation of order within nature with the notion of entropy. (chapter two) The issue of entropy was also central to the young Gregory Bateson’s work as an anthropologist. Bateson’s theory of schismogenesis (1935) addressed the matter of how a society, which has conflict at its centre, could maintain equilibrium over a long period of time. (chapter z). This was resolved, for Bateson in the 1940s with a new understanding of schismogenesis as an expression of negative feedback (negentropy). As the “information age” emerged, Edwin Schrödinger delivered the What is Life lectures (1942) which suggested that chromosomes contain the coded script of the body (a decade before being given empirical credence by Watson and Crick); a few years later, in 1945, the physicist Leon Brillouin first suggested a relation between information and entropy, coining the term “Negentropy”. 3 Norbert Wiener, in Cybernetics (1948), stated the issue in terms which were quantifiable and provided a precise relation for entropy and information, in the sense that units of information (binary units or bits) within a message can be measured against noise (being the measure of entropy in the message):

“Organism is opposed to chaos, to disintegration, to death, as message is to noise.”5 In Wiener’s conception of negentropy, the second law of thermodynamics still holds, systems will always run to disorganisation, but negentropy allows for a decrease in the rate of dissipation. This is because knowledge of order is fed back through the system which allows the system to conserve order. In this sense, negentropy represents a localised reversal of time’s arrow. It is possible, stated Wiener “to interpret the information carried by a message as essentially the negative of its entropy, and the negative logarithm of its probability. That is, the more probable the message, the less information it gives. Clichés, for example are less illuminating than great poems.” 6