Anentropy
Considering the other day’s post, I thought I would post something a little less flame-y and defensive. My interest in information does actually go further than only making debate against those who have a differing opinion. I’ve been working on a work to be entitled “This is Information” that I imagine to be a kind of unification of the concepts of information between physics, communication theory, artificial intelligence, psychology, design, and various other disciplines. There are a lot of varying concepts on the subject of information, which should come as a surprise to no one given we are only still in the dawn of this “third wave” of civilization. A project that pulls it all together has seemed to me like a good use of time for a while now, so without further ado, I present the introductory section to the chapter on entropy and anentropy:
Consider a simple glass. It is not a complex object in shape. And it is not relatively complex into terms of its materials. To simplify it, we can just say that a glass is made out of sand. But that’s not all that makes a glass. To construct a glass requires energy. It also requires information. The glassmaker must know the temperature to heat the glass to, how to cool it, and numerous other things. The more complex the structure of the glass, the more the glassmaker must know. But the information is not transferred to the glass. The energy it takes to sustain the glassmaker, the energy his motions require, that energy is transferred to the glass. Gradually, if that glass were left on a sandy beach somewhere, natural forces would tear it apart. We call this increase in disorder in the universe entropy. Glasses tend to shatter and not form themselves from nothing. It is as if the natural resting state of the universe is total disorder and randomness and everything is moving in that direction. Everything except the glassmaker, that is.
