Recently I have been trying to fathom what Alan Wilson’s ‘Superconcepts’ entail. The most recent, ‘Entropy’ involved a hell of a lot of hard and long mathematical equations explaining what is essentially: 1) Things always move from order to chaos without intervention and 2) Heat always moves from hot to cold 3) the spread of information to a wider group. As a non mathematician, I was shaken by those long and bizarre numerical sentences, but as things were explained in plain English, I realized that this complex and nuanced idea of Entropy has earnt it’s stripes as a Superconcept because of the pure universality of it’s basic ideas. So I am going to offer a few examples of how Entropy can be applied to the social sciences, the arts, and humanities in order to further the buzz word, ‘Interdisciplinarity’ whilst trying to break down the two cultures division.
Lets take the social science, Psychology to begin, but specifically depression and mental wellbeing. I would argue that modern psychiatric disorders follow a very clear entropic system in the sense that without active intervention, through either the person themselves, a psychologist, or a psychiatrist, the disorder continues it’s exacerbation. So in defining a good mental state as order and the bad mental state as chaos, this system follows the first definition of entropy well. Of course the definition of good and bad mental states may change; perhaps there is virtue in a chaotic mind for creativity and imagination, however if ‘order’ is seen to be the clarity of someones thought, appropriate emotional fluctuation and all round contentment so the person can lead a happy life, I think entropy does it’s bit in explaining a model of depression or other mental health disorders.
Moving to a more abstracted sense of Entropy, perhaps English literature – the reading, writing, and analytic practices in the subject – also moves in a metaphorically entropic sense. Take for instance the process of writing a novel; the heat of ideas and flair of creativity condensed into the sober and definite object of a book could mirror the second definition of entropy. Or indeed the ideas and politics that surround the author in their life; the zeitgeist of their time in either literature genre or the style of prose, which influence and spread amongst the reader and writer people in the culture. This spread of information perhaps influences the author and they use their writing to pull all these influences together, mirroring the third rule defined.
Or indeed, he process of painting a picture or creating any Art. The ordered and clean canvas to the painted one; the extended process of the new artist’s studio, with clean white walls and organized work top, evolving to the used, paint splattered individual’s creative space; or more literally the process of opening and using a tube of new paint, all go from the ordered to the chaotic, in a distinctly entropic movement.
There is something beautiful in the flow of Entropy; it is always one directional and there is a feeling of equilibrium and balance in the chaos or spread. Perhaps, Wilson’s Superconcepts should become more wide spread to engage a more general audience of critics; these Superconcepts assisting in the movement and development of social attitudes to problem based task solving. But above all I think Entropy is another lense for us to view the world through, maybe revealing new thinking about this previously known.
freyasthought 