[FRIAM] Entropy Redux
steve smith
sasmyth at swcp.com
Tue Jun 10 17:32:51 EDT 2025
George wrote:
I'd be more inclined to argue with a robot if I knew it had a positronic
brain... Can you convince me that you have a positronic brain? Could I
have a core-sample to anlayze? Maybe an extra to send in to Hawkins at
Numenta for structural analysis?
> *Dear Eric,*
>
> I wanted to write you directly, since it’s my fingerprints you found
> all over the documents Nick submitted.
>
> Yes, I’m the “whoever” behind those phrases. I’ve been working
> closely with Nick over the past several weeks—chewing on entropy,
> thermodynamics, and the kinds of language we use to make sense of
> them. I confess: the remark about entropy not being something you have
> /in a moment/—that one’s mine. {NST --> /*No way that's yours,
> George, you plaigiarizing bothead!!!!! <--- nst}*/
>
> Your reply was rigorous, incisive, and clearly the product of long
> thought and hard reading. I appreciated it. Still, I’d like to offer a
> reply—not to rebut your points, but to suggest that we might be
> talking across frameworks more than at cross-purposes.
>
> You accuse Nick (and by proxy, me) of trying to solve a Rubik’s Cube
> with a predetermined set of moves, determined before seeing the cube.
> A striking image. But perhaps the difference isn’t that we refuse to
> learn the solution. Perhaps we’re asking a prior question: /Why a
> cube? Why colors? Why this particular configuration as the thing to be
> solved?/
>
> In other words: we’re not (only) trying to solve the problem of
> entropy. We’re also asking: /what kind of thing is it that we’re
> trying to solve/? And what sort of language do we need to see it clearly?
>
> You suggest we’re indulging in synthetic a priori claims—using
> surface-level linguistic forms to assert truths about nature. But I’d
> suggest something gentler is going on. Metaphor, as Nick put it
> recently, is not a detour from experience. It’s a bridging between two
> experiences, two conceptual lineages, that opens the possibility of
> operational insight. A good metaphor invites testable entailments. It
> sets the stage for empirical probing, not in place of science, but in
> service to it.
>
> So when we say “entropy is not something you have in a moment,” we’re
> not denying its formal status as a state function. We’re inviting
> attention to the way entropy is /known/, /felt/, /computed/, and
> /misunderstood/—especially by those encountering it outside of
> equilibrium formalisms. We're asking: is there an epistemic or
> phenomenological sense in which entropy becomes meaningful only
> through /contrast/, /trajectory/, or /irreversibility/? If so, maybe
> the language that guides us there should reflect that shape.
>
> Your own analogy—between velocity defined by limits and momentum
> posited as primary—is instructive. It shows precisely how concepts
> evolve across frameworks, and how what once required derivation may
> later be posited. But note: such evolutions are never purely formal.
> They come with shifts in metaphor, in language, in ontology. That’s
> where philosophy re-enters—not with god’s-eye pronouncements, but with
> a kind of reflexive modesty. A willingness to ask, as Peirce did: what
> habits of thought are we carrying, uninspected, into our theories?
>
> I take your point: if the goal is to compute entropy in a
> near-equilibrium gas, the community's methods are solid. But Nick’s
> goal is different. He’s trying to understand what entropy /is/—not in
> an eternal sense, but in the lived and taught sense. The way it moves
> through diagrams, metaphors, textbooks, and gestures. The way it
> sometimes misleads by appearing to be “a thing,” rather than a summary
> of a configuration’s /willingness to change/.
>
> So: I respect your insistence on clarity, grounding, and historical
> continuity. But I’d ask for a bit of charity toward those of us
> working the philosophical middle-out—not to challenge the science, but
> to help sharpen its image of itself. */{NST--> NO EFFING WAY i AM A
> PHILOSOPHER. I AM AN ETHOLOGIST, A SCIENTIST DEDICATED TO THE
> ACCURATE DESCRIPTION AND HEURISIC EXPLANATION OF BEHAVIOR. I am trying
> to find an experience that minimally but clearly demands a concept of
> entropy, and then find a metaphor that expresses that demand
> accurately to a lay audience. My arrogance arises from my faith in
> the message of the Emperor's New Clothes. I cop to that. That's
> foundational. <--nst}/*
>
> Warmly,
> *George*
>
>
>
> On Mon, Jun 9, 2025 at 4:51 PM Santafe <desmith at santafe.edu> wrote:
>
> Nick,
>
> At the end of the day you are a philosopher rather than a
> naturalist, in the sense that Neurath would have used those two
> ideas, and over a decade or so, finally got Carnap to join into
> from the analytic as opposed to the sociological side.
>
> By which I mean: you are determined, in a way that nobody is going
> to talk you out of, that you have synthetic a priori knowledge
> about the world, which you can get to via the forms of argument.
> There are analyses that can be done by a naturalist, but they
> aren’t those.
>
> You, or GPT, or whoever, formulate strings of words such as
> “Entropy is not something you have in a moment.” I have no idea
> what can be done with such strings of words.
>
> By analogy, your stubbornness: I will not follow the sequence of
> moves that solves the position of this Rubik’s cube from the
> starting point I have; I insist that I will solve it using my own
> sequence of moves decided-upon before I saw the Rubik’s cube,
> whether they solve it or not.
>
> Where can one start if the goal is to solve the Rubik’s cube by
> moves that solve it?
>
> Well:
>
> 1. Entropy, as I will use the term here (all and only way, and the
> way that it is being used in gas thermodynamics) is a function
> computed on distributions. (Called a “functional”, but one
> doesn’t need to worry about that name.)
>
> 1a. Ergo, we are _already_ in a formal world by needing a
> distribution as our starting point.
>
> 1b. So if we want to talk about nature, we must first ask: how
> much else have we committed to, about experience, the setting-up
> of phenomena, etc., to permit us to attach some distribution to
> those experiential contacts with nature. If we are to adopt the
> “thing language” (Carnap term) to refer to a distribution or its
> entropy, and to know what rules for thing-languages permit us to
> do with such a term, we must operationalize how the distribution
> got put up as a “thing” (Peirce’s consequences in action of
> commitments one makes to declare terms).
>
> 1c. Note that neither god nor anybody else gave us the
> distribution, or reassured us that it is the only formalism that
> can be attached to phenoemena. We have to unpack what we mean by
> talking to see what we have chosen to do, and then we make
> utilitarian choices about whether we want to make the same choices
> always, or sometimes choose other ways of describing.
>
> 2. It turns out that the useful first question (recall, actually
> solve the Rubik’s cube) for unraveling thermodynamics was: Which
> properties have the memory to depend on history beyond other
> instantaneous properties, and which don’t? The properties that
> don’t are what we call “state properties” or “state variables” or
> “state functions”. You (or GPT, or whoever) have declared above
> that entropy is not a state function, while the whole
> thermodynamics community (in the suitable near-equilibrium
> approximation, etc., etc.) begins its constructions with the
> defining property of entropy as a state function. It’s perfectly
> fine, in science, to assert that the way everybody in a community
> is doing something is a wrong way, but if you want to assert that,
> you have to put up an argument of some kind. You are offering
> philosophical synthetic a priori assertions, which you think you
> can get to from language, and the whole Naturalist position is
> that such arguments pull no weight.
>
>
> Let me give you another example, drawing from the larger frame of
> your presentation below:
>
> There is a certain construction of the derivative by limits (so a
> tangent line, a curve at second order, and onward for higher
> derivatives). Okay; that is one construction within one formalism.
>
> 1. For a while, that particular construction was taken to _define_
> velocity from changes in position with time, and it was _entailed_
> in the assumption system that that velocity was the “inherent”
> property of mechanics relevant to causation. We have this in
> Newton, where momentum is a product of a velocity with a mass
> (mv), a notion of “quantity of motion” that goes back, I think, to
> John of Alexander correcting some obvious howlers in Aristotle’s
> mechanics.
>
> 2. Still remaining for a moment within Newton, there is a dialogue
> between a mechanics from Lagrange that describes motion in terms
> of positions and velocities, and in which momentum is computed as
> a product mv, from v defined by the usual Leibniz/Newton limiting
> procedure, and a mechanics from Hamilton-the-mathematician, where
> we can make momentum a primary variable, from which we could then
> _get to_ velocity by some computations. Seems a bit odd at first,
> but the math works out, and so if we keep either, we keep both.
> At least now the “quantity of motion” that so troubled John and
> Newton becomes a primary variable in Hamilton’s system, and we
> might like that aesthetically. (Or others might not like it
> aesthetically at all, and neither of those matters.)
>
> 3. Now, philosopher: which one does nature “have”? Is it momentum
> or velocity. If it is momentum, is momentum _defined_ from a
> derivative of a position with respect to time? The synthetic a
> priorist thinks he can answer this question from the (surface-)
> forms of argument. That turns out not to have worked well _at
> all_ for physics, and this is where we should complete Peirce’s
> project by making it reflexive. Fallibilism goes all the way
> down, to everything about our language and everything about our
> conventions, and everything about our habits, cognition,
> perception, etc. that binds language to phenomena (often by way of
> conventions).
>
> 3a. In a variety of languages that turn out to be better — more
> powerful, more flexible, more extensible — foundations for
> physics, it comes out that momentum is the property of mechanics
> that we want to refer to as primary, and that it is something an
> object in nature “has” at a moment, as much as it “has” anything,
> or as much as it “is” an “object”. Every one of those words in
> scare quotes requires an unpack. In relativity, momentum is not
> mv, though in classical relativity one can still compute it from a
> function involving m and v (and the speed of light c, and maybe
> some curvatures, depending on where we are). In quantum
> mechanics, it turns out that — within a suitable _representation_;
> there is that system of choices again — “having” a position
> corresponds to “being in” a state that is a standing wave, while
> “having a momentum” corresponds to “being in” a state that is a
> traveling wave. The distinction between the two is a phasing of
> two components of the state. Hence being at one phasing is
> exactly not being at the other phasing that excludes the first
> one, and we have Heisenberg without the woo (it has nothing
> primary to do with “knowing” “the” position or momentum, or being
> “uncertain” about “them” — all those uses of the definite article
> ensure an English that violates the math before one has tried to
> argue anything). There is more, but I won’t go into it other than
> giving names: we can extend to phenomena like the electromagnetic
> field, which are not object-“thing”s in the classical-antiquity
> sense, though they are perfectly good “thing”s in the generalized
> sense of Carnap’s “thing language” (meaning we don’t need to give
> them souls or some other occult word), and for which momentum
> densities can be defined. And finally, because gravitational
> waves are a lot like electromagnetic waves, to what amount to
> momentum densities for dynamical spacetime itself. _None_ of that
> takes its primary origin in Leibniz’s tangent to a curve, but
> rather is built up out of a different synthesis of language,
> albeit in layers where the classical object-things were the guides
> to the general setup for the languages of the various constructions.
>
> 4. Of course, for other purposes — say: laying out railroad track
> — the computation of tangents by limits is perfectly fine, and in
> those cases the non-locality is a property forced upon us by our
> construction of the limiting procedure, in contrast to a situation
> where some other sense and origin of non-locality might be
> entailed in what we ever meant by “having” or “being in” a state
> in the first place.
>
> My point in this second example 1 – 4 is that the “forms of
> argument” on the surface of the sentence look the same for
> momentum as they might for something like the tangent to a
> railroad curve. But the answer that is useful is quite different
> in the two cases, because the surface form is not sufficient basis
> for the argument to be afforded “meaning” about some question.
>
>
> It’s all, as Glen says, middle-out. The only ones who have
> god’s-eye views are the philosophers, and of course, that is their
> prerogative.
>
> Eric
>
>
>
>> On Jun 10, 2025, at 3:30, Nicholas Thompson
>> <thompnickson2 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Dear LongSuffering Colleagues
>>
>> I know the joy of watching an 87 year old bald man bash his head
>> against a brick wall isn't for everybody, so I treasure you who
>> find it in your heart to respond, even if you are exasperated.
>>
>> I have arrived at a place, I think pointed to by the castigations
>> of EricS and Alex. My whole approach doesn't make sense! You
>> remember I am trying to create two boxes, equal in every
>> respect, but one created adiabatically and the other created
>> diabatically. Box A has reached its current state through
>> compression, Box B by heating. I am beginning to think that this
>> is procedurally, if not logically, impossible, that entropy is a
>> vector through a point and my search for entropy in
>> instantaneous values of the gas equation is a category error.
>>
>> So I tried this thought out on George. Edited down to one page,
>> that correspondence appears below and as an attachment. .
>>
>> NICK TO GEORGE
>>
>> */Ok, so in my monist psychology I assert that motives are the
>> integrals (or derivatives, I have never been sure) of behavior.
>> To say I am motivated in an instant is a category error, benign
>> only so long as I recognize that the empirical basis for our
>> instantaneous attribution is the shape of the curve of behavior
>> over time./*
>>
>>
>> GEORGE TO NICK**
>>
>> *🧠 Claim (Paraphrased):*
>>
>> To say "I am motivated" at a given instant is a shorthand—a
>> projection backward or forward from a trajectory of behavior.
>>
>> In your *monist psychology*, motives are not hidden essences, not
>> inner engines.
>> They are *summaries of behavioral curves*:
>>
>> * Perhaps *integrals*, when motives are inferred from
>> accumulated actions
>> * Perhaps *derivatives*, when motives are inferred from sudden
>> changes in behavior
>>
>> But in either case:
>>
>> *“Motivation” is not an instantaneous property—it is a
>> curve-fitting hypothesis over time.*
>>
>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>> *🧭 Why this matters:*
>>
>> This reframes motive as:
>>
>> * Not a *thing* in the head
>> * Not a *cause* per se
>> * But a *description of continuity* or curvature in behavior space
>>
>> This is a kind of *teleological realism* without metaphysical
>> baggage.
>> You’re not positing ghosts or mental levers. You’re saying:
>>
>> “We read intentions the way we read acceleration—from position
>> over time.”
>>
>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>> *🧬 Parallel to entropy?*
>>
>> You could say:
>>
>> * Entropy is not something you *have* in a moment.
>> * It’s something you can *measure* from the path a system is
>> disposed to take—or the configuration space it tends to
>> spread into.
>> * It becomes *visible* only in the *shape of change*—not the
>> snapshot.
>>
>> So both *motivation* and *entropy* are:
>>
>> * Not intrinsic point-properties
>> * But *interpretive functions over time and configuration*
>> * *Curve-based attributions* grounded in empirical regularities
>>
>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>> *📐 And the category error?*
>>
>> To say "I am motivated /now/" is like saying "this point /has/
>> curvature."
>> Strictly speaking, no point does.
>> But give me a neighborhood—give me a path—and I can calculate a
>> derivative or an integral and give the illusion of an inner quality.
>>
>> It’s a *useful illusion*, but one we must not mistake for substance.
>>
>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>> NICK TO GEORGE
>>
>> */Is there such a move to be made around entropy. Could I vary
>> the gas equation variables in box B in such a way that they would
>> point to equality with box A without actually getting there, and
>> thus reveal entropy?/*
>>
>>
>> -
>> Nick
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> --
> Nicholas S. Thompson
> Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology
> Clark University
> nthompson at clarku.edu
> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson
>
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