Notes: The Field We're Entering

Chapter notes for “The Field We're Entering”

Notes

Lindsay, Robert B. “Entropy Consumption and Values in Physical Science.” American Scientist 47 (1959): 678-696. The original Thermodynamic Imperative.

Massoudi, Mehrdad. “A Possible Ethical Imperative Based on the Entropy Law.” Entropy 18 (2016): 389. Extension of Lindsay with imperatives toward simplicity, conservation, and harmony.

Woodward, Ashley. “Affirming Entropy.” Technophany 2:2 (2024). Nietzschean critique of anti-entropy positions.

Fultot, Martin. “Ethics of Entropy.” Philosophy and Computers 15:2 (2016). American Philosophical Association. Challenge to Floridi’s information ethics; argues entropy production and order are reciprocal: “Order is nature’s favorite way of producing entropy.”

Herrmann-Pillath, Carsten. “Towards Pragmatist Thermodynamics: An Essay on the Natural Philosophy of Entropy and Sustainability.” Entropy 27:12 (2025): 1257. Peircean synthesis of thermodynamics and normativity.

Parker, Michael C., Chris Jeynes, and Stuart D. Walker. “A Metric for the Entropic Purpose of a System.” Entropy 27:2 (2025): 131. Formal quantification of purposive behavior.

Hartwig, M., and A. Peters. “Cooperation and Social Rules Emerging From the Principle of Surprise Minimization.” Frontiers in Psychology (2021). Free energy principle applied to multi-agent coordination.

Merlo, Alejandro, and Xabier E. Barandiaran. “Beyond Fatalism: Gaia, Entropy, and the Autonomy of Anthropogenic Life on Earth.” Ethics in Science and Environmental Politics 24 (2024): 61-75. Thermodynamic warrant for anti-fatalism.

Wallace, Rodrick. “Cognitive Failure: A Catastrophe Theory of Institutional Decay.” UCLA IPAM preprints. Stability analysis yielding the 1/e threshold.

Tononi, Giulio. “An Information Integration Theory of Consciousness.” BMC Neuroscience 5 (2004): 42. Foundational IIT paper. Defines consciousness as integrated information (Φ): a quantity that is computable in principle but intractable for systems beyond a few elements. Updated in Tononi et al., “Integrated Information Theory: An Updated Account,” Archives Italiennes de Biologie 150 (2012): 56-90. Rich axiomatic structure, clear criterion (Φ > 0), but the criterion cannot be applied to brains or AI at scale.

Penrose, Roger, and Stuart Hameroff. “Consciousness in the Universe: A Review of the ‘Orch OR’ Theory.” Physics of Life Reviews 11:1 (2014): 39-78. Proposes consciousness arises from quantum computations in microtubules, collapsed by gravitational self-energy. Experimental evidence for sustained quantum coherence in warm biological tissue at the required timescales remains contested. See also Penrose, The Emperor’s New Mind (Oxford University Press, 1989) for the original argument. For the decoherence objection: Tegmark, M., “Importance of Quantum Decoherence in Brain Processes,” Physical Review E 61 (2000): 4194-4206.

Pollard-Wright, Holly. “A Unifying Theory of Physics and Biological Information Through Consciousness.” Communicative & Integrative Biology 14:1 (2021): 78-110. Maps consciousness onto the cosmological inventory (dark energy = pure awareness, dark matter focal points = mental states, normal matter = mental images). Thirteen figures, no mathematical formalism. Published in an integrative biology journal, not a physics journal.

Pollard-Wright, Holly. “The Feelings of Knowing — Fundamental Interoceptive Patterns (FoK-FIP) System: Connecting Consciousness to Physics.” Communicative & Integrative Biology 16:1 (2023): 2260682. Follow-up shifting from cosmological consciousness to interoceptive self-awareness. The move toward bodily signals as the substrate of selfhood illustrates how consciousness-first programmes, seeking empirical ground, converge on preference-adjacent territory.

Sichelman, Ted M. “Quantifying Legal Entropy.” Frontiers in Physics (2021). Shannon entropy applied to legal systems — law as entropy management.

Montévil, Maël. “Entropies and the Anthropocene Crisis.” AI & Society 38 (2021): 2451-71. Anti-entropy as biological capacity for organizational renewal.

Stiegler, Bernard. The Neganthropocene. Open Humanities Press, 2018. Key text for neganthropology: negentropy as struggle, pharmakon as poison/cure, proletarianization as knowledge-stripping.

Mussett, Shannon. “Human Aging and Entropy.” Technophany 2:2 (2024). Elderly as “waste to be jettisoned”—extraction logic applied to human bodies through de Beauvoir’s phenomenology.

Carvalho, Tiago Mesquita. “On Entropy and Responsibility in the Thought of Ivan Illich.” Technophany 2:2 (2024). Epimethean hope vs. Promethean control; the limits of intervention.

Ritter. “The Neg-Entropocene: An Ecological Rethinking of Stiegler’s Neganthropology.” Topoi (2025). Secondary source for Stiegler engagement; connects to Georgescu-Roegen’s ecological economy.

White, Joel, and Gerald Moore (eds.). “Entropies.” Technophany 2:2 (2024). Special issue with 15 papers on entropic ethics and philosophy.

¹ Bent, Henry A., “Entropy and the Energy Crisis,” The Science Teacher, May 1977, pp. 25–30. Bent’s “personal entropy ethic” and the injunction “thou shalt not unnecessarily create entropy” originate from this 1977 article and related NSF-funded workshops, not from his earlier textbook The Second Law (Oxford University Press, 1965), which provides the underlying thermodynamic framework. See also Bent, “Haste Makes Waste: Pollution and Entropy,” Chemistry 44(9) (1971): 6–15, for an earlier articulation of the entropy-and-responsibility theme.

² Hammond, Dick E., The Human System: From Entropy to Ethics (Ginn Press, 1985). ISBN: 0536050597. Hammond, who served as a post-doctoral researcher under Ilya Prigogine at the University of Texas from 1977 to 2003, argued that entropy ethics could serve as a secular replacement for religious moral instruction in public schools. His doctoral thesis, “Analysis of Entropy Reduction and its Implications for Ethical Instruction in Public Education” (Ed.D., University of Arkansas, 1978), established the foundations. Note: Massoudi (2016) extends Robert Bruce Lindsay’s “Thermodynamic Imperative” (1959), not the Bent-Hammond lineage directly, though all three share the project of deriving ethical obligations from thermodynamic principles.

³ Floridi, Luciano, The Ethics of Information (2013). Oxford University Press. Floridi’s information ethics equates moral Good with the preservation and flourishing of “qualitative order” in the infosphere, and Evil with entropy as the degradation of information. Fultot’s challenge (see Fultot entry above) argues this binary is unsustainable because entropy production and order are reciprocal rather than opposed.

⁴ Hofstadter, Douglas R., Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (Basic Books, 1979), pp. 99–101. Saccheri’s near-discovery of hyperbolic geometry and the liberation of undefined terms.

⁵ Hofstadter (1979), pp. 173–176. The triadic structure of messages: frame message, outer message, and inner message.

⁶ On the S-matrix bootstrap and quantum gravity: Guerrieri, A., Penedones, J., and Vieira, P., “Bootstrapping Gravity,” Physical Review Letters 127 (2021): 081601. The trio calculated the minimum quantum correction (α) to Einstein’s gravity in supersymmetric 10-dimensional spacetime using only unitarity and Lorentz invariance; the value 0.14 ± 0.01 matched string theory’s lower bound of 0.1389. On the naturalness crisis and UV-IR mixing: Wolchover, N., “A Deepening Crisis Forces Physicists to Rethink Structure of Nature’s Laws,” Quanta Magazine (March 1, 2022). On “anti-reductionist gravity”: Dubovsky, S., at New York University, quoted therein. The CKN bound (Cohen, A.G., Kaplan, D.B., and Nelson, A.E., “Effective Field Theory, Black Holes, and the Cosmological Constant,” Physical Review Letters 82 (1999): 4971–4974) showed that the size of the observable universe constrains the number of available high-energy states, predicting the observed cosmological constant from a UV-IR relationship.

“The seed was planted before I existed. The water is love. This book is what grew.”