Entropy and Self-Organization on the Table Top [Emergence]

I'm bumping this to the top of the queue: 1) on general principle, and 2)  because I was going to include some of this material in a paper that goes up on 3 Quarks Daily, but then I decided not to use it. So here it goes. Moreover (3), it's a good antidote to the all too frequent and casual use of the concept of "emergence," which more often than not is used as a sophisticated synonym for "magic." We don't really know what's going on so we'll call it emergence. Well, in this case, the appearance of convection cells, we know what's happening:

The tumbler was sitting on a window sill during the morning and mid-day on a sunny day. Sunlight came through the window and heated the water, just a bit. But the black carbon particles in the ink absorbed energy faster than the water molecules, making them warmer than the water in which they were immersed. That’s what supported the formation of those convection cells, which began dissipating within an hour after they had formed. No violation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. You can download this discussion as a PDF from this link.

With a Note on What to do When You are Fascinated by Technical Concepts but Lack the Math: Call the Plumber!

Matter is not given. In the present-day view it has to be constructed out of a more fundamental concept in terms of quantum fields. In this construction of matter, thermodynamic concepts (irreversibility, entropy) have a role to play. 

–Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, Order Out of Chaos, 1984

I’ve been thinking a lot about entropy lately.

It is, of course, one of the foundational concepts of modern thought, haunting our dreams with the prospect of the universe grinding to a halt in heat death, but also animating our hope of understanding how life arose in the universe. In a Latourian context one might even speculate that entropy is the concept that, more than any other (except perhaps biological evolution, with which it has become richly intertwined), gives the lie to the Modern’s conceit that they are here and nature is somewhere over there, separated from one another by a sharp line of clear and distinct ideas. For the concept of entropy, unlike relativity and quantum mechanics, has arisen from deep within the world of classical physics.

According to the Wikipedia the term was coined in 1865 by Rudolf Clausius, but the work leading to the concept originated earlier in the century with the research of Lazare Carnot, a mathematician whose

1803 paper Fundamental Principles of Equilibrium and Movement proposed that in any machine the accelerations and shocks of the moving parts represent losses of moment of activity. In other words, in any natural process there exists an inherent tendency towards the dissipation of useful energy. Building on this work, in 1824 Lazare's son Sadi Carnot published Reflections on the Motive Power of Fire which posited that in all heat-engines whenever "caloric", or what is now known as heat, falls through a temperature difference, work or motive power can be produced from the actions of the "fall of caloric" between a hot and cold body.

There you have it, the machine, a mechanical device with moving parts. We have Newtonian mechanics with its three laws of motion and the grand suggestion that the universe works like a clock, a vast device of many parts all ticking away in perfect order, except when they don’t. And there’s La Mettrie’s 1748 treatise, Man a Machine.

Oh! how easy our intellectual life would have become if only the universe were nothing but a clock and we but little tick-tocks within it.

But it is not, nor are we. The mechanistic vision ground to a halt in the analysis of fire and we became but especially clever monkeys through Darwin’s elucidation of a pattern he traced though the geological, paleontological, botanical and zoological records.

Chasing Molecules

Though my interest in entropy is long-standing, my recent thoughts have been occasioned by various and numerous remarks the philosopher Levi Bryant has made at Larval Subjects, his blog. The post Entropy and Me is a representative example. Or, consider this passage from his book, The Democracy of Objects (pp. 227-228):

Entropy refers to the degree of disorder within a system. Suppose you have a tightly closed glass box and somehow introduce a gas into it. During the initial phases following the introduction of the gas into the system, the gas will be characterized by a high degree of order or a low degree of entropy. This is so because the particles of gas will be localized in one or the other region of the box. However, as time passes, the degree of disorder and entropy within the system will increase as the gas becomes evenly distributed throughout the box. In this respect, entropy is a measure of probability. If the earlier phases of the gas distribution indicate a lower degree of entropy than the later stages, then this is because in the earlier phases there is a lower degree of probability that the gas will be localized in any one place in the box. As time passes, the probability of finding gas particles located evenly throughout the box increases and we subsequently conclude that the degree of entropy has increased.

This seemed a bit, well, “off” to me. For one thing Bryant doesn’t say just how the gas gets introduced into the box. Surely he doesn’t mean that it gets magically whisked there through a Star Trekkian transporter. But what DOES he mean?

Well, he probably meant something like poking a small hole somewhere in the box and letting the air rush in. So that’s what I did. Not physically, of course, as I have no convenient source of high-vacuum boxes, but in my imagination.

I began imagining lots and lots of tiny tiny air molecules going in through the hole. Does that first cohort march in formation like a highly trained marching band or drill team, or do they twist and tumble every which way, pushed by the molecules behind them, and those behind them, and so forth? How fast do they move? Who’s the first to make it to the other side? And how do you measure their positions?

It seemed reasonable to think, as Bryant more or less stated (except, remember, he said nothing about a hole), that they’d be bunched up near the hole at the beginning and that, at the end, they’d be scattered evenly throughout the box. But how’d they get from one state to the other? Getting from New Jersey to New York is easy, there’s the Holland Tunnel, the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, and so forth. But the kind of states we’re talking about aren’t geographical regions and moving from one to the other is not like getting in a car, turning the key (or pushing the button) and driving away.

And, by the way, just what does “evenly” mean? It might mean that they’re at the vertices of a cubic lattice, or some other regular structure, but I suspect that that’s not what Bryant meant. If not THAT, though, then just what? Perhaps he was, in his imagination, dividing the box into lots of tiny cubes. We then count the number of molecules in each cube. It doesn’t matter just where they are in the cube, just so they’re inside it. Some place. And when we’ve done our count we find that there’s approximately the same number in each imaginary cube.

Now we’re getting somewhere, says I to myself, we’re making progress.

But no, we’re not, we’re just getting deeper and deeper into the quicksand. What’s the size of our imaginary cubes? Does it matter? And those molecules, they’re moving, right, always moving. Since we can’t possibly examine all these imaginary cubes at one time, but have to look at one after another, how do we keep those molecules inside their proper imaginary cubes? And, since the little critters are identical to one another, how can we be sure that some of them aren’t sneaking about from cube to cube just to mess up our count?

Now, you might say, this is all nonsense, this stuff about imaginary cubes and pesky molecules who are unwilling to sit still for the count. Well, yes, you’re right, it’s nonsense in a way. But, if Bryant’s talk about order and probability is to have any substantive meaning, then we really do have to have some way of locating and counting those molecules. We need some way of taking measurements and my imaginings, some of them anyhow, are aimed at the informal notion of evenness. If we're going to measure it, well, what does it mean? Without measurements we’re just talking gibberish.

Still, it’s clear that something isn’t working. My thinking was at an impasse, that’s clear. I’m in over my head. What to do?

Call the Plumber

My plumber is Tim Perper. Though he’s not a plumber, he’s not even a physicist. He was trained as a molecular biologist and geneticist, worked in industry for a bit, worked in academia for a bit, and then decided that he was really more interested in human courtship than in complex molecules. So he spent a couple years hanging out in bars, night clubs, church socials and such and wrote down what he saw people doing—all courtesy of the Guggenheim Foundation. He wrote that work up in a book, Sex Signals (1985), that work and, of course, a lot more, including Ovid and Durkheim.

Tim Perper: Polymath, Friend, and Colleague

My friend Tim Perper died unexpectedly on January 21 of this year. An obituary was published in the Philadelphia Inquirer. This post contains some more personal remarks.

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I met Tim Perper online sometime in the late 1990s. It was on a listserve devoted to memetics. Neither of us had much patience for the more or less prevalent concept of memes as pesky little mental thingies that flitted about from one brain to another, taking over neural real estate in orgies of self-perpetuation. And so we argued against that idea in its various forms while attempting, against the tide, to formulate more serious ideas about cultural evolution. We also hung out on a listserve devoted to evolutionary psychology. Tim was a biologist by training – molecular biology and genetics – while I had been interested in both primate ethology and neuroscience since my undergraduate years at Johns Hopkins.

In mid-career, however, Tim was able to convince the Guggenheim Foundation to fund two years of research on human courtship in which he observed couples interacting in venues such as bars and church socials. Tim had thus become something of a cultural anthropologist. He incorporated that field research into Sex Signals: The Biology of Love (1985), which also drew on the Western literary tradition going back to classical times.

Tim and I had a lot to talk about: culture, biology, sex, love, and literature. And we talked about it all, mostly through email, but also over the phone and in-person as well. When I was researching my book on music, Tim drew my attention to the work of Walter Freeman, a neurobiologist at Berkeley. Tim was interested in complex dynamics and chaos, as was Freeman. So was I, but I didn’t have the technical background that Tim had, so I would turn to him to discuss such matters, interactional synchrony – which he’d observed in his courtship research – in particular.

Plucky Heroines from Haggard to Hikaru and Buffy

This is a guest post by Timothy Perper, PhD and Martha Cornog, MA, MS, who served as Book Review editors for Mechademia: An Annual Forum for Anime, Manga, and the Fan Arts, a scholarly journal about Japanese cartooning and popular culture. Cornog is the graphic novel columnist for Library Journal. They have written extensively about manga and anime and edited Mangatopia: Essays on Manga and Anime in the Modern World (Libraries Unlimited 2011). Perper and Cornog, who are married, have also written extensively about gender and sexuality.

In an essay on The Valve (and republished on New Savanna), Bill Benzon asked a series of questions about H. Rider Haggard, a 19th century English novelist who wrote adventures set in Africa about supernatural white heroines. Haggard’s characterizations raise questions about how women and girls were portrayed in his adventure fiction, and are prescient in view of later portrayals in American and Japanese popular culture in both text and visual media.

It's not hard to place Haggard's views of women. In principle, he idealized the "pure womanhood" of England – for example, missionary Mackenzie's wife in Allan Quatermain – but at the same time his work reflects his male readers' uneasy yearning, heavily though not explicitly eroticized, for women who are passionate, active, heroic, and sexually motivated. Haggard was not writing Victorian pornography, but in his treatment of white women from Africa – ESPECIALLY white women like Ayesha in She and many other of his mature white heroines – he reveals the same impulse to eroticize the exotic that Steven Marcus saw as fundamental to Victorian pornography. (note 1) For Marcus, such pornography finds its closest genre relatives in utopian fantasy – hence Marcus' term "pornotopia" for the worlds portrayed in such literature. In such a pornotopia, women are not passive wallflowers, timid, meek, and obedient to their masters or to the patriarchy; instead, they are active agents of their own sexual purposes and desires, intermingled with a desire and capacity to rule the state as queens and empresses. (You will find an echo of this set of attributions to women in the Empress card in the standard Tarot deck.)

Haggard, Women, and the Wild

In many ways, Flossie Mackenzie in Allan Quatermain – the 10-year old daughter of a Scottish missionary – is simply a very young version of a heroine like Ayesha. Flossie is self-reliant, unafraid, armed, and dangerous, and kills a Masai warrior with the two-barreled Derringer pistol she carries when he attacks her. Although she is therefore attractive, Haggard seems uneasily aware that such a life is somehow not right for Woman, that is, not what a patriarchal God intended: here are his comments about Flossie, put into the mouth of his spokesman Allan. When Mackenzie decides to return to England with his wife and Flossie, Allan praises him:

"I congratulate you on your decision," answered I, "for two reasons. The first is, that you owe a duty to your wife and daughter, and more especially to the latter, who should receive some education and mix with girls of her own race, otherwise she will grow up wild, shunning her kind..." [Chapter 8]

Allan – and therefore Haggard – seems well aware that for Flossie a life in Africa is a ticket to the "wild," a place where 10 year-old girls like Flossie shoot leopards and men and live their own lives under their own rule, certainly not (Allan thinks) a world or role suited to an ideal Englishwoman.

Conterfactual Criticism in Action

I've criticism Graham Harman's notion of counter-factual criticism in a series of posts on this blog (e.g. in this post, where I discuss Greene, Shakespeare, and Lévi-Strauss), which I've also rolled up into a PDF, Reading with Graham.

If you want to see some counter-factual criticism in action, or something very like it–as I don't really know, concretely, what Harman had in mind–see Tim Perper's comments in this discussion of Miyazaki's Porco Rosso.

Some Varieties of the Hero

Tim Perper has added extensive comments to yesterday’s bleg in which I asked for books about heroes. I’ve copied those comments into the first part of this post. After his remarks I’ve appended a passage by Northrup Frye.

Tim Perper: Preliminary Remarks on Heroes and Heroines in Manga and Anime

I was recently asked to comment on a paper about heroes in manga and anime, not only in general, but also specifically suggesting sources the author might want to use from other writers and critics. I’m no expert on Heroes in literature, but I know something about manga and anime.

The paper talks about the nature of the “hero,” failed heroes in particular, about manga and anime, about Fate/Zero and Madoka Magica, about Emiya Kiritsugu and Homura Akemi, and quite a range of other topics. I suggested that some focusing might help, but some related ideas might be more interesting here.

Thanks to your comments, it sure looks like there’s not all that much written by Western literary critics about the Hero as archetype – Joseph Campbell did a book on such heroes, and there’s a psychoanalytical literature as well, e.g., Otto Rank. However, there IS a good deal of writing on individual heroes in novels, plays, films, and comics. Franco Moretti did a book on the modern epic that covers a lot of this ground, and there are others as well.

The basic idea is that the concept of the Hero has changed very drastically in Western literary history – for example, starting with tales of King Arthur and of various Irish folk heroes, from a millennium or more ago, and then running into the “death of the hero” in the 19th century “bourgeois” novel, followed by his resurrection as Anti-Hero in the 20th Century, like Rieux, the anti-hero of Camus’ 1947 The Plague. The first kind of hero (King Arthur) is a man – no women in this literature! – who embodies the nation and its people, beliefs, and ideals in himself. The earliest and greatest was perhaps Beowulf from the 700s in Old English – he is archetype of the Ideal Man of his society. In 1936, J.R.R. Tolkien wrote a masterful essay about this kind of hero. By contrast, Rieux is simply a physician stranded by World War II in Oran when the black plague strikes...

With the development of the bourgeosie in Europe starting ca. 1850, heroes like King Arthur and Cormac mac Airt faded away into memory. They have reawakened today only as cardboard fossils in modern video games of sword-swinging “heroes” who fight an endless array of multicolor computer monsters. Those computer game “heroes” are NOT heroes in the original sense of a man of great courage facing moral uncertainty and death – like Odysseus in Homer’s poetry or the heroes in medieval stories of Roland.

Part of the Sartrean existentialist vision – it arose in France after the end of World War II – denies that such heroes can even exist today. Hegel – who wrote an analysis of these king-heroes – is dead; long live Nietzsche – who wrote about the Lesser Man who supplanted the king-hero. With the Lesser Man comes Willy Loman from Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1949) – a failure, not heroic enough even to be tragic. In US supercomics, we move away from one set of cardboard characters, like early Superman and Batman, to other cardboard characters like Peter Parker as Spiderman and Batman, the Dark Knight: the hero as a neurotic. The bourgeois “hero” has become not a heroic king, but Marcus Welby, M.D., played on US television by Robert Young from the 60s to mid-70s, and Jim Anderson, also played by Robert Young on Father Knows Best from the 50s to the mid-70s.

Another Lesser Man is Luke Skywalker – and with Star Wars a new element begins to emerge: the heroine starts to replace the Lesser Man in strength, courage, and just plain rattling warriorship. A much discussed subgenre of the Dangerous Heroine is the rape-revenge film, which has attracted a fair amount of critical attention, e.g., by Jacinda Read.

Bleg: Heroes and Heroines

My friend and colleague Tim Perper sent me the following email:

I need some references to canonical or not-so-canonical work on The Hero in lit crit. I'm looking for the kind of book about which knowledgegable people would say "Oh, you haven't read Warnoff's book? Well, you really MUST, you know --" whoever Warnoff may have been. Also anything by various Big Name critics, especially those Southern School guys with three names, like Walter Tamlake Carothers, whoever HE may have been.

I also need some equally canonical, or if not canonical then equally hip, discussion of differences between the Hero and the Heroine.

If you can throw in some Russian formalists, that'd help too. You know, Obstretchnikov's essay on "The Peasant Hero in Russian Folktales," written in 1923 under the influence of -- well, you get the idea.

In a word, I want the basic stuff, without which one is simply ignorant, like I am at the moment.

The first thing that came to mind was Joseph Campbell's Hero of a Thousand Faces, which also turned up at the top of a Google Scholar search. Anyone have any suggestions? Anything in that Google list look interesting?

Some Animals and Animal/Humans in Miyazaki

In private email Tim Perper suggested that it would be interesting to compare Marco/Porco, pig-man, with the animals and “hybrids” in other Miyazaki films. Interesting, yes. But also exhausting.

Still, I decided to at least map out the “space.” In this post I list each Miyazaki feature, listing them in the order in which he created them. I then make some brief remarks about animals and hybrids in those films. At the end I conclude that Howl and Sophie in Howl’s Moving Castle provides the most interesting comparison with Marco/Porco and Gina/Fio in Porco Rosso. Thematically, Ponyo makes an interesting comparison with Porco Rosso, though that takes a little explaining. I do not even attempt to formulate an overall statement about Miyazaki's use of animals and animal-human hybrids. That's way beyond the scope of these informal notes.

Note: You might want to view this post as a complement to the earlier post in which I sketched out the different worlds in many of Miyazaki’s features.

* * * * *

Castle of the Cagliostro (1979): This is a naturalistic film, albeit one with a great deal of physically implausible action. There is one significant animal in the film, a dog that is the beloved pet of Princess Clarisse and that remembers Lupin. This dog is just a dog.

Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984): This is a strange world, filled with strange creatures. In particular it is filled with insects that are large, horse-size, to very large, whale-size. The ohmu appear to have telepathic powers and are able to communicate with Nausicaä. While these insects are strange, they are not ambiguous within their world. They are what they are.

The world also has one living Giant Warrior, which seems to be an organic creature constructed by humans as a super-weapon. Again, strange, but within its world, it is not ambiguous.

Castle in the Sky (1986): No animals play a significant role in this film. There are two very large robots which, as such, have been artificially constructed. And there is a mineral, etherium, which has some kind of bond with Sheeta, legitimate successor to the throne of Laputa. As for the few animals, I recall some birds and some ancient fish on Laputa, but that’s it.

My Neighbor Totoro (1988): This film has some very interesting creatures. There are dust gremlins, several totoro, and the cat bus. Though the adults seem to know of such creatures (Granny especially) they are visible only to the two young girls, Mei and Satsuki. They are ambiguous in that it is not clear whether these are simply creatures of the girls’ imagination or whether they are real enough, but simply invisible to adults. As far as I know all of these are creatures that Miyazaki has made up, though the cat bus owes a debt to Lewis Carroll’s Cheshire cat.

While the movie is named after the Totoro, they are not the protagonists; Mei and Satsuki are. Within their world there is nothing particularly problematic about the Totoro.

Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989): Kiki, the title character, is a witch. She can fly; other witches, such as her mother, apparently have other powers in addition to flight. Kiki has a cat, Gigi, who appears to be able to talk. However, midway through the film Kiki looses her witches powers and can no longer fly. Nor can she understand what Gigi is saying. When Gigi “talks” she, and we, hear only ordinary meowing.

This seems similar to the moment in Porco Rosso where the sleeping Fio awakens to see, not Porco Rosso, but Marco Pagot. And we see him too. This is a ‘deviation’ from the ‘baseline’ state of the movie, which is that everyone in the film sees him as Porco, including us. So, in Kiki, the baseline is that Kiki can understand Gigi, and so can we. When the baseline fails for Kiki, it fails for us.