Exosomatic memory is a crucial phase in the evolution of humanity because it enables learning to take place across groups and generations rather than exclusively through lived experience or one on one transmission. Exosomatic memory is the attribution of knowledge to objects, such as art or writing, which allows epistemology to be transmitted beyond the individual to subsequent generations of people. Exosomatic memory is the key to the transmission of culture and knowledge, beyond the individual who learns exclusively from personal (...) experience. This places technologies such as writing and art in a key position for the education of culture and knowledge. Stiegler develops these ideas, following Martin Heidegger, Leroi-Gourhan and Derrida from the Palaeolithic to the contemporary.Maori use of natural objects as exosomatic transmission of intergenerational learning exceeds the technological enframing of modernity outlined by Heidegger. For indigenous peoples, exosomatic memory is cultural, technological and ecological.Stiegler argues that the impact of cybernetics on knowledge production is accelerating the technological enframing of knowledge (2018). Consequently, information technologies are leaving the human mind behind, in passive receptivity rather than dynamic creativity. The prefrontal cortex is slower than the internet, exacerbating a widening lag in active understanding, in favour of passive absorption. Alienation and epistemological entropy are trapping us in climate change and the anthropocentric Capitalocene. Maori insight may cut the Gordian knot and sidestep the alienation and determinism of technological modernity. (shrink)

Teleology can be defined as goal seeking behaviour with production of negentropy, i.e. with generation of an state improbable under the given conditions. Contrary to an opinion often hold, the production of negentropy does not mean an decrease of entropy. That permits a physical and non-teleological explanation for the origin of the negentropy of the univers in its present state.

There has been an excellent series of formative articles centring on Bernard Stiegler (1952-2020) as an inspiration to pedagogical thought; this is a summative article written from the perspective of after his death. Stiegler argued that education is ontologically crucial to human development, wherein technics or the ‘not-experienced-condition(s)-necessary-for-experience’ are crucial to humanity’s ability to create its own existence. Technics make possible the technologies underpinning contemporary Anthropocentric existence. While entropy poses the cosmological threat of death to life, technics supports negentropy (...) or the collecting and marshalling of energy opposed to entropy. Education is a crucial means of social negentropy, however all human agency is characterized by the pharmakon of more entropy or increased negentropy. The tension is inevitable in the pharmakon between on the one side, care and cure; and on the other, poison and death. In this article, we ask: ‘Given his suicide, what sort of pharmakon was Stiegler for himself and for us?’1 The authorial “I,” ‘Bernard Stiegler’ is no longer a living critic of social entropy or of proletarization and ‘technoscience’; what do we now make of his oeuvre for education? We will point to his inversions and purposeful mis-interpretations of Heidegger and Derrida as crucial to his oeuvre. Stiegler’s phenomenal being has ended; what technics have been strengthened and specifically: ‘What now of education?’. (shrink)

A classic source for understanding the connections between information theory and physics, this text was written by one of the giants of 20th-century physics and is appropriate for upper-level undergraduates and graduate students. Topics include the principles of coding, coding problems and solutions, the analysis of signals, a summary of thermodynamics, thermal agitation and Brownian motion, and thermal noise in an electric circuit. A discussion of the negentropy principle of information introduces the author's renowned examination of Maxwell's demon. Concluding (...) chapters explore the associations between information theory, the uncertainty principle, and physical limits of observation, in addition to problems related to computing, organizing information, and inevitable errors. 1962 ed. 81 figures. 14 tables. (shrink)

Background: how mind functions is subject to continuing scientific discussion. A simplistic approach says that, since no convincing way has been found to model subjective experience, mind cannot exist. A second holds that, since mind cannot be described by classical physics, it must be described by quantum physics. Another perspective concerns mind's hypothesized ability to interact with the world of quanta: it should be responsible for reduction of quantum wave packets; physics producing 'Objective Reduction' is postulated to form the basis (...) for mind-matter interactions. This presentation describes results derived from a new approach to these problems. It is based on well-established biology involving physics not previously applied to the fields of mind, or consciousness studies, that of critical feedback instability. -/- Methods: 'self-organized criticality' in complexity biology places system loci of control at critical instabilities, physical properties of which, including information properties, are presented. Their elucidation shows that they can model hitherto unexplained properties of experience. -/- Results: All results depend on physical properties of critical instabilities. First, at least one feed-back or feed-forward loop must have feedback gain, g = 1: information flows round the loop impress perfect images of system states back on themselves: they represent processes of perfect self-observation. This annihilates system quanta: system excitations are instability fluctuations, which cannot be quantized. Major results follow: -/- 1. Information vectors representing criticality states must include at least one attached information loop denoting self-observation. -/- 2. Such loop structures are attributed a function, 'registering the state's own existence', explaining -/- a. Subjective 'awareness of one's own presence' -/- b. How content-free states of awareness can be remembered (Jon Shear) -/- c. Subjective experience of time duration (Immanuel Kant) -/- d. The 'witness' property of experience – often mentioned by athletes 'in the zone' -/- e. The natural association between consciousness and intelligence -/- This novel, physically and biologically sound approach seems to satisfactorily model subjectivity. -/- Further significant results follow: -/- 1. Registration of external information in excited states of systems at criticality reduces external wave-packets: the new model exhibits 'Objective Reduction' of wave packets. -/- 2. High internal coherence (postulated by Domash & Penrose) leading to a. Non-separable information vector bundles. b. Non-reductive states (Chalmers's criterion for experience). -/- 3. Information that is: a. encoded in coherence negentropy; b. non-digitizable, and therefore c. computationally without digital equivalent (posited by Penrose). -/- Discussion and Conclusions: instability physics implies anharmonic motion, preventing excitation quantization, and totally different from the quantum physics of simple harmonic motion at stability. Instability excitations are different from anything hitherto conceived in information science. They can model aspects of mind never previously treated, including genuine subjectivity, objective reduction of wave-packets, and inter alia all properties given above. (shrink)

This article attempts an organological and pharmacological re-interpretation of the later Heidegger’s understanding of modern technology as a provocative mode of revealing of beings, in particular of its central notions of Gestell [enframing] Gefahr [danger], Kehre [turning] and Ereignis [event]. Although these notions in principle allow us to think what is at stake currently in the Anthropocene as the age of total automation, generalized toxicity of the technical milieu and post-truth calling for a radical bifurcation, they need to be reframed (...) and re-imagined in terms of the process of exosomatization issuing from humanity’s original and necessary default of origin and situated within the perspective of entropy and negentropy, both unthought by Heidegger. Only thus will it become possible to really think and take care of what Heidegger called the danger of technology and its turning into the event as the destiny of enframing. This also requires a rethinking of Aristotle’s theory of four causes as it is invoked by Heidegger in his analysis of technology, in particular the efficient and final causes, in terms of what Deleuze called quasi-causality, here understood as the need and the obligation for mortals to make their fault come true, i.e., to make it truly happen or make it advene in truth, out of the experience of the danger as the ordeal of the necessary default. Thus becoming the anti-anthropic cause of anthropic toxicity, humans would restore final causality as quasi-causality and inaugurate, as neganthropos, the bifurcation into the Neganthropocene. (shrink)

Quite often the compatibility of the EPR correlations with the relativity theory has been questioned; it has been stated that “the first in time of two correlated measurements instantaneously collapses the other subsystem”; it has been suggested that a causal asymmetry is built into the Feynman propagator. However, the EPR transition amplitude, as derived from the S matrix, is Lorentz andCPT invariant; the correlation formula is symmetric in the two measurements irrespective of their time ordering, so that the link of (...) the correlations is the Feynman zigzag, and that causality isCPT invariant at the microlevel; finally, although the Feynman propagator has theP andCT symmetries, no causal asymmetry follows from that. As for Stapp's views concerning “process” and “becoming,” and his Whiteheadean concept of an advancing front, I object that they belong to “factlike macrophysics,” and are refuted at the microlevel by the EPR phenomenology, which displays direct Fokker-like space-time connections. The reason for this is a radical one. The very blending of a space-time picture and of a probability calculus is a paradox. The only adequate paradigm is one denying objectivity to space-time—but this, of course, is also required by the complementary of the x and the k pictures, which only “look” compatible at the macrolevel. Therefore, the classical “objectivity” must yield in favor of “intersubjectivity.” Only the macroscopic preparing and measuring devices have “factlike” objectivity; the “transition” of the “quantal system” takes place beyond both thex and thek 4-spaces. Then, the intrinsic symmetries between retarded and advanced waves, and statistical prediction and retrodiction, entails that the future has no less (but no more) existence than the past. It is the future that is significant in “creative process,” the “elementary” forms of which should be termed “precognition” or “psychokinesis”—respectively symmetric to the factlike taboos that “we can neither know into the future nor act into the past.” It is gratifying that Robert Jahn, at the Engineering School of Princeton University, is conducting (after others) conclusive experiments demonstrating “low level psychokinesis”—a phenomenon implied by the very symmetry of the negentropy-information transition. So, what pierces the veil of “maya” is the (rare) occurrence of “paranormal phenomena.” The essential severance between “act” and “potentia” is not a spacelike advancing front, but the “out of” and the “into” factlike space-time. Finally, I do not feel that an adequate understanding of the EPR phenomenology requires going beyond the present status of relativistic quantum mechanics. Rather, I believe that the potentialities of this formalism have not yet been fully exploited. (shrink)

In Of Grammatology, Derrida discusses Leroi-Gourhan in relating différance to memory, the ‘program’, and the history of life. In Technics and Time, 1, Stiegler argues that Derrida failed to draw all the philosophical implications of linking différance to the questions of life and retention. Derrida returned to the life sciences in 1975, in a seminar not published in its entirety until 2019. There, Derrida attempts to deconstruct the geneticist François Jacob's account of the ‘logic of life’, but Derrida's analysis of (...) different kinds of memory and programs seems confused, suggesting that the Derridean text remains haunted by the deficiencies of his earlier reading of Leroi-Gourhan. Later in the seminar, Derrida shows foresight concerning the problems arising from seeing the genetic molecule as akin to a computer program, despite Jacob making this link via Schrödinger and Wiener's discussions of negentropy. When Derrida turns to a reading of Freud and libidinal energy, however, he ‘assumes’ a reading of Laplanche but ignores the latter's critique of Freud's own preoccupations with the second law of thermodynamics. The limitations of Derrida's attempts to bring deconstruction together with scientific understanding expose the need for the kind of ‘organological’ and ‘neganthropological’ approach that Stiegler will ultimately pursue. (shrink)

In his last work, Relire le relié, Michel Serres develops a philosophy of religion that circumvents the conventional demarcations of reason and faith, knowledge of the world and knowledge of revelation, or agnosticism and apology. In a structuralistically-informed relecture, he exposes the basic traits of religion. With its narratives and theologoumena, it captures and describes being-in-the-world as an event of universal synthesis. It is – in Serres’ diction – about the basic relatio of energy and information, entropy and negentropy, (...) chaos and order. This relié is described neither as an effort or act of a subject, a system, a language community, nor sufficiently as an emergence effect of evolutionary-natural processes. The recording of this synthesis forbids both any dichotomy of an irresolvable hiatus as well as the construction of a unitary space of any kind. (shrink)

It has been shown by several authors that in operations involving information a quantity appears which is the negative of the quantity usually defined as entropy in similar situations. This quantity ℜ = − KI has been termed “negentropy” and it has been shown that the negentropy of information and the physical entropy S are mirrorlike representations of the same train of events. In physical terminology the energy is degraded by an increase in entropy due to an increased (...) randomness in the positions or velocities of components, wave functions, complexions in phase space; in informational terminology some information about the same components has been lost or the negentropy has been decreased. In equilibrium the system has for a given energy content maximum randomness. One consequence of this dual aspect was the idea to apply the methods of statistical mechanics to problems of communication and Brillouin showed that Fermi-Dirac statistics or generalized Fermi statistics are applicable for example to a transmission of signals such as telegrams. (shrink)

Devoted to the late Paul Virilio (1932–2018) and in the advent of debates surrounding the Anthropocene and in light of corresponding changes to conceptions of scale and image, this paper attempts to extrapolate a Virilian pedagogy of the image. It is Virilio’s work which remains timely and singularly fecund in this area and it is for this reason that it may help to shape a new pedagogy of scale and image. This may allow us to better grasp the decentring of (...) human conceptions of time and space as we come to better understand the vastness of cosmological space and time. To demonstrate this, his work is read in tandem with Félix Guattari’s work on ecosophy and Bernard Stiegler’s work on negentropy to show how Virilio’s critique of the diminishment of perspective diverges from their respective approaches to forge an arresting pedagogy of the image vis-à-vis geographical and ecological conceptions of Earthly spatial and temporal scale. The perceived poverty of Earthly perspective is read in the light of a scalar perspectivism which understands the enormity of the universe and humanity’s microscopic place within it. As Virilio is concerned with the changes in scale which manifest with the onset of globalization, the question arises as to how an applied dromology (that is the philosophy of speed) may work alongside both Guattari’s schizoanalytic and ecosophical research and Stiegler's pharmacology of the image in a way that mounts a robust and unique critique of the mental pollution of the image as such. Here the pedagogical implications are significant as the diminishment of world perspective for Virilio – a consequence of the singular global time of capital – devastates our understanding of the cosmos. This understanding of the poverty of scale and perspective is contrasted with a multiscalar approach to the world, which is itself searching for a philosophical and pedagogical response to the reduction of the world to nothing. (shrink)

– The paper explores first the postulational basis and significance of‘measures of information’in current information theory and their possible relations to physical entropy and Brillouin's‘negentropy’regarded as the negative of entropy. For some purposes, the same pattern or formal structure may be abstracted from both‘entropy’and‘information’. The paper analyzes, in the second place, the mathematical analogies which have been traced between information theory and quantum mechanics and argues that the analogies have but a limited value when we come to grips with (...) the deeper, and yet unsolved, problems of quantum theory. Lastly it is urged that the indiscriminate extensions of statistical and information‐theoretic methods, and of quantum‐mechanical analogies, e.g.‘linguistic duality’, to psycholinguistics, literary and aesthetic Gestalten, can result only in crude exaggerations. Dialectical methodology requires the continual reformulation of all scientific descriptions which have to reckon perpetually with the richness of human materials. (shrink)

Function refers to a broad family of concepts of varying abstractness and range of application, from a many-one mathematical relation of great generality to, for example, highly specialized roles of designed elements in complex machines such as degaussing in a television set, or contributory processes to control mechanisms in complex metabolic pathways, such as the inhibitory function of the appropriate part of the lac-operon on the production of lactase through its action on the genome in the absence of lactose. We (...) would like a language broad enough, neutral enough, but yet powerful enough to cover all such cases, and at the same time to give a framework form explanation both of the family resemblances and differences. General logic and mathematics are too abstract, but more importantly, too broad, whereas other discourses of function, such as the biological and teleological contexts, are too narrow. Information is especially suited since it is mathematically grounded, but also has a wellknown physical interpretation through the Schr dinger/Brillouin Negentropy Principle of Information, and an engineering or design interpretation through Shannon's communication theory. My main focus will be on the functions of autonomous anticipatory systems, but I will try to demonstrate both the connections between this notion of function and the others, especially to dynamical systems with a physical interpretation on the one side and intentional systems on the other. The former are based in concepts like force, energy and work, while the latter involve notions like representation, control and purpose, traditionally, at least in Modern times, on opposite sides of the Cartesian divide. In principle, information can be reduced to energy, but it has the advantage of being more flexible, and easier to apply to higher level phenomena. (shrink)

continent. 2.2 (2012): 155–158 Michel Serres. Biogea . Trans. Randolph Burks. Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing. 2012. 200 pp. | ISBN 9781937561086 | $22.95 Conveying to potential readers the significance of a book puts me at risk of glad handing. It’s not in my interest to laud the undeserving, especially on the pages of this journal. This is not a sales pitch, but rather an affirmation of a necessary work on very troubled terms: human, earth, nature, and the problematic world we made. (...) It is this world that aspirates the silence (so to speak), and therefore the subject which, along with the development of the “made world” exports the excess augmentation of the cosmically missing, this silence of the natural, et cetera. Had we learned from Locke that lesson of “labor,” to consume what we need… but perhaps we need more than what matters? Serres’ Biogea has several functions on this manner, if it is indeed a book to be consumed. First, readers searching for novelistic entertainment have a place to dwell. Biogea deserves a place in your back pocket; biographical generosity and poetic fluidity should satisfy most textual fetishes. For lay philosophers who want to refresh their acumen, Biogea deserves a place on the book shelf, one already reads a sorely needed postmodern tune-up here. Serres’ style is clearly French; he leaves few cheese crumbs on his words, rather preciseness and breathing in the work give way to a sweeping manner that breaks the narrative line of sight. A circular narrative and anachronistic fragmentation of terms allows an abyssal atmosphere to swell, if only to pump into the book the externality of its broader text. Biogea aspires to a higher standard and the book, at times, is thinking this negentropic problem too. Univocal, the publisher, has crafted a book appropriate for the hands to hold and the translations are an achievement of an otherwise difficult writer to translate. Terms are the conditions of a broader text. It is important to note that Serres’ content is as much a thinking of terminal ports. There is a regard for the transportation technology of the written word. For me, this is the mark of genius, a craftiness that tells of a book device that I may trust. Serres is an accomplished thinker and a necessary voice to check the putative trendiness of anti-postmodernist and market-driven theory of endless cultural liquidation. Offering interventions on subjectivity as an open system we are given a chance to affirm the human, not merely to discard it, but to engage its poetic image emotion, the calibratory silent sense of the analogic world; the terms on which we base our efforts. 1 The human is the center of its own negation, constantly mediating it. Something deeper at stake appears in the work then, and it is quite obvious from the onset. Certainly, a book is an intensification of possible text and those who brought this actual book into existence have captured a rarity in regards to the subject matter and artistic accomplishment. I mentioned terms as conditions, so let us understand Biogea as bio-yea, a yes to bios . An affirmation of living and accepting presence for all of its defiance of images, words, and things temporal. Therefore Serres’ existence and its existants plays parts; out of linearity and still like a porous bone pumping blood it manufactures into the fleshy life it becomes. Starting from a man named silence chaos emerges, or the man “Old Taciturn” takes up a journey anticipating a great flood. In other words, a development akin to the one in Genesis. In dealing with this ancestral occupation, fusing Genesis with contemporary philosophical terms, Serres initiates this anachronistic fragmentation under the forming subjectivity of his own autobiography. This mutation in the open system is precisely one of Serres’ terms. There an abyss is at work, stated, but also measured by heels on the ground—the abyss dispatching earthen tensions, that which plays our tunes, that which we abide by and recognize in volcanoes, rivers, oceans, earthquakes and weaponry in the battles of the world. Set in later stages of the book, such tensions are harnessed through scientific principles in an attempt to unify the terms of natural force if only to terminate the world. Thus the elevation of the earth into the world is clearly set forth. Here already, and few pages in, a resonance is set forth under appellations such as the river Garonne, a subjectivity as much as it is inhuman, the river is the inhuman that makes us human. I get the sense that Serres is taking up a challenge issued by Wallace Stevens; namely, that the great poems of heaven and hell have been written, but that only the poem of the earth has resisted composition. 2 On this level we cannot avoid the killing factor of silence, given that our cognition blocks its pure, radical obliteration. Thus a silence of attunement to the earth is in a novel dialectic of the rithmic and rhythm. A technological world, a triumph of termination is set forth. If a text imposes its will given the reader who authorizes it, it is made to convey or convect a presupposition to a reader or its inhabitant(s). Text is therefore both, in-content, contenting, contentedness, and in reading it, a way to navigate self-destruction (dis-content). Here then would one note that the “inhuman” reveals itself, “an aperiodic rhythm of lovers and beloved…the sea as our friend…but as our enemy…maternal vivifying sea.” The sea is an open book, or vaginal birth canal, where the engagement of text comes forth: “…woman sea, open vulva.” One sees like the sea, but only after it, when the uninhabitable truth of inhabiting it switches the polarity of the sailors soul: “I was seeing like the sea” (9-11). In other words, we are invited to embrace the nonsense of the visible. At this point I am taken to Jean-François Lyotard’s work The Inhuman , specifically the first entry on negentropy that would be congruent with Serres’ thematic. 3 The human being exports, deports, or transplants its relation through text, through the system— and this is its sense or relation to silence, to music. Unaware of Serres’ proximity to this work, the concept of gender interrelation as regards a solar catastrophe runs clear. It would be, on this basis, that Serres references his peers, the other texts that, as mentioned above, are discarded in philosophy today. For students of philosophy what we have here is perhaps a gift, a needed project. If silence and death are at work, there is a political valence to deal with, and here, much like the domain of the text and the dominion of the reader, we confront the world of natural, fluid violence. The anti-postmodernist critique is in part based on a weak idea that the loss of ideology, of a world vision, motivates the “correlationist” project. 4 Serres seems to offer another way to view this when he notes that whereas persons “sometimes kill,” it is clearly “the collective” that “always kills” (17). What is the collective today, if not an organizing function we never see yet acts in its favor in the name of truth? One feels a sense of enigma here, if only to link to what Stevens remarked of communism as a “grubby faith,” providing this applies for capitalism as well, namely any ideology of progress overly interested in absolutes. Here we get the sense that the inhuman, silence, this type of killing, always killing, could not be matched by human-made, political dynamos. Or that if it comes to an equilibrium, a catastrophe is never too far from us to read with our heels. We are left to note that the forces of nature presuppose and permeate political systems, the more these systems obtain force, the more the system takes upon itself the proper name of nature that motivates its dissemination, albeit falsely. This note, that in an age of ecocide and technological captivity (sustainability and transparency) political regimes won’t grow our soul-learning ears any larger than our tongues, stands clear to us. The promise of technological desubjectification is here pushed aside. Regarding politics, Serres illustrates this fact: Where did this corpse come from? Who was it? Who killed it? I don’t know. I won’t try to find out. I refuse to get vengeance for it. And I only see Garonne. For our victims, today, are the rivers, too. Their waters have irrigated my life, enchanted my thought, invigorated my body; I’ve known them to be threatening, untamable, as dangerous as the sea when it rages. Yes, murderous. They decided to control their courses; dams, sometimes senseless, destroying sites and valleys, reduced entire populations to servile displacements; programs for the irrigation of thirsty farmland, often beneficial of course, completed their drying up.(22) Serres enters into his idea concerning the captivity of language from the natural into a world system: For thousands of years, we have been licking things with our tongues, covering and daubing them so as to appropriate things for ourselves. If language boils down to a convention, this convention took place between the speakers without consulting the thing named, become as a result the property of those who covered it in this way with their drawn or voiced productions. Malfeasance analyzes these acts of appropriation. Thus every inert object, every living thing as well, sleeps under the covers of signs, a little in the way that, today, a thousand posters shouting messages and ugly riots of color drown, with their filthy flood, the landscapes, or better, exclude them from perception because the meaning, almost nil, of this false language and these base images forms an irresistible source of attraction to our neurons and eyes. This appropriation covers the world’s beauty with ugliness. (38-39) Technological concealment coming to bear, we begin to get a sense of another commentary on the condition of sensing, driving home the necessity of a text dealing with such subject matter to be what its terms insist. Thus toward new openings: The new opening. As low beneath our feet as you like, the Biogea opens us to another space, high enough for us to be able to acquire a wisdom there, that of redeveloping this same place differently from our fathers, this place that’s still politically cut up by old hatreds, beneath the flood of tears and blood that we call history. Without this soft place, spiritually very old, but newly conceived in this way, without the juridical construction of a common good, opposed to our filthy ownership, I don’t see how our planet, hard, will survive. Hardness that depends on a softness, material belonging that depends on this temporary rented location (51). Serres enters into a summit on the content and the structure of his work. Archimedes is brought in with the concept of three volcanoes. Meaning fire, but as well earth, water, air. For it was Archimedes’ war machines that sought to lift the earth, thus bringing in the question of principles of science: “can a principle be invented while controlling its consequences?” (66-7). May the earth be put in a sentence, terminated by terminology, appellations, gone wild? By means of these element-dominating laws, this old physicist began to tear nature away from the ancient myths; by a strange return, today we’re plunging our successes back into the anxieties and terrors from which that ancient physics was born. Yes, our new history of science and technology is plunging, today, as though in a loop, into the fundamental human myths from which Empedocles’ first laws came. A major progression and a regression on the nether side of the origins. Consequently, the contemporary time requires that we try to return to that unity in which the principles of hate and love are at the same time human, living, inert and global. We will never attain a deontology of our knowledge and actions without thinking the subjective, the objective, the collective, and the cognitive all together simultaneously. Here, hate and love are the result of these four components.(71) Working then on the concept of fire-starting mirrors to the atomic annihilation of the Second War, Serres works into the subjectivity in question on the matter of rhythm—say rithmic— precisely at that point: Knowledge is changing today. The all-political is dying; the monarchy of the sciences said to be hard is coming to a close. The science of the things of the world will have to communicate just as much as the things of the world do, which do it much better than humans do, who don’t always want to do it. Let’s celebrate two changes this morning. The first one strikes a new blow to our narcissism. No, knowledge and the world don’t resemble our analytical enjoyments of refined cutting up, of endless debates and of exclusions full of hate. They, on the contrary, form a bloc and a sum, alliance and alloys. Uniting the fields of knowledge among themselves the way the things are connected among themselves, the second newness puts into place sets united by interlacing, webs and simplexes that combine with the things of the world, themselves combined, the combined knowledge that understands them.(130-1) Biogea closes on its opening flood thematic, approaching the initial telos of Genesis. Here the trees are brought into a position with atmosphere, the opaque abyssal reservoir, the tomb of the sun, sea in the polarity of the earthen heaven and hell. The poem of the earth then is silent but deadly, indeed, as funny as that phrase is, mainly a tomb gas. The meaning of the living and the non-meaning of things converge in the muteness of the world; this meaning and non-meaning plunge there and come out, the ultimate eddy. Mundus patet: through a fissure, through an opening, a fault, a cleft come noises, calls as small as these apertures. I’m listening, attentive, I’m translating, I’m advancing in the scaled-down meaning and science. Mundus patet: should the world open greatly, it will launch me into its silence. The totality remains silent. Knowledge expanded in elation. White origin of meaning, fountain of joy. (198) Final Remarks One test of a review is the long term trajectory the referee thinks the book will have. I see Serres’ text lending greatly into the vision of Biogea . In fact, in the vision of the novel inquiries of Stephen Jay Gould’s work there is something to be thought on the level of the individual and the species; namely, that humanity and its uniqueness is in its deferral, its thinking and naming, a thinking surrounded by silence that filters into everything, that pulls us through the world, the kinetic pulse we recognize, and all of that we cleave away in the base philosophical maxim of difference itself. Unique individuals are spatial creatures: we dwell, and we ought to get good at it. Yet this is an imaginative space that, if you are crazy enough to believe it, de-term-ine the conditions of its own terms. That is why we are not merely creating spaces on the acceleration of time, or so this ignoramus thinks, to accidentally transcend. Imagination already has this insatiable silence that we drink up and fail to manifest. Space is timeless. The imagination itself, shared by humans for themselves, their objects, and the species as a whole, is a non-defined space of relation; a whole human trajectory as part of nature, and part of worlds that are the other side of thinking nature, the consequence of it, at least our attempt to do so. Our survival is based on our deliberation, our caution, our natural deconstructive sense toward this silence that is already part of the song, sung, singing of this century without end. Good books will let us inhabit this space and recognize a form of life. Serres’ text moves toward dwelling, as noted, in masterful and accessible ways. The pitched battles are the falling replays of anemic and dead politics. As soon as we realize there is humanity, we may be able to enjoy the end of it, our inhuman capability of listening to silence. NOTES 1. See Michel Serres. The Parasite . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2007. 2. Wallace Stevens, “Imagination as Value” [ca. 1945], in Collected Poetry and Prose . New York: The Library of America. 1997. 724-39. 3. Jean-François Lyotard. The Inhuman: Reflections on Time . Trans. Geoffrey Bennington & Rachel Bowlby. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. 1992. 4. See the introduction: Quentin Melliassoux. After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency . Trans. Ray Brassier. New York: Continuum. 2008. EDITOR'S NOTE: This review was updated on August 8, 2012. Substantial edits include block quotes from the book under review as well as the inclusion of comments from the author. (shrink)

Dissipative structures exist at all scales, systems, and at different levels of complexity. A thermodynamic theory integrating simple and complex DS is introduced, which addresses existence of growing/decaying DS based on their entropy analysis. Two entropy-based dimensionless ratios are introduced, which explain negentropy-debt payment and existence of DS with growth or decay. It is shown that excess negentropy debt payment is needed and beneficial for growing DS; but for decaying DS, it hastens its approach to perish and is (...) counter-productive. Growing complex DS tend to pay lower negentropy debt to their surroundings, due to involvement in other activities enabled by complexity; e.g. mediation for survival that is linked to their mortality. Hence, disorder of complex DS increases, due to which, their growth can be un-sustained, leading to entry in decay-phase in spite of availability of adequate mass-energy in-flows. Proper handling or reduction of complexity enables growth in the direction of ideal growth, which is limited only by availability of adequate mass-energy in-flows. (shrink)

In this article human-posthuman ruptures and disconnections both in comprehension and in practices, as well as the possibility of epistemological contingency contemporaneously are investigated. This means that an epistemological ruptures and an ontological disconnections of sexuality both differ from one another, and also join together. Since ancient times both sensitive and sensible practices of sexuality were considered the best mode to concern to sexual care of self. It has shown that, in relation to sexuality, a correlation of epistemological discontinuity and (...) continuity is possible. Sexuality, which is actualized with the help of both natural, vital and death, annihilative drives, fits into the context of onticology as a posthuman ontology. Being connected with the thermodynamics of infinitesimal vital parts, anonymous strange strangers, singularities, it turns out to be especially awesome. Such a mode of sexuality is not necessarily reproductive; rather, it unfolds in the fluid space of non-presence and at the same time determines this space. It emphasizes that that the cos mo‑illogical becoming of posthuman leads to negentropy or extropy as vitality. Following this position, the foucaultian conception of the care of self mirrors lacanian graphs of sexuation in a context of object-oriented ontologies in comparison with philosophies of presence. It is recognized that this is the sexuality of the productive disconnection and the pleasure cosmic dissolution. This article concludes by illustrating that the mode of sexuality of Speculative Posthumanism is contingent with the Libidinal Materialism or Vital Posthumanism in a context in which the sexuality of Wide Human Descendants is thought to be oriented to that which is pleasure and is differentiated. (shrink)

Brillouin sees order as generated by tapping negentropy sources existing upstream, while Prigogine sees it as generated by dumping entropy downstream. Joining both ideas yields a picture of the computer closely paralleling that of Carnot's heat engine. The difference is that the one delivers information and the other, work. In either case the irretrievable (that is, by definition) loss occurs at the last step. Bennett and Landauer very rightly emphasize this, but their fixation on the condenser blinds them to (...) the necessity of the furnace; thus they are led to believe in the possibility of “perpetual duplication of the second kind,” which Brillouin explicitly denies. (shrink)

The ‘French reading’ of Nietzsche crystallized almost 50 years ago at the 1972 conference at Cerisy-la-Salle, Nietzsche aujourd’hui. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the annual conference of the Friedrich Nietzsche Society, with the theme of ‘The Politics of Difference’, Newcastle University, 20–21 September 2018. Nietzsche’s fortunes have since undergone some dramatic shifts in France, but there are signs that he is once again on the ascendency, in particular the 2016 edited collection Pourquoi nous sommes Nietzschéens (a (...) direct riposte to the 1991 Pourquoi nous ne sommes pas Nietzschéens). Taking a bearing from the French readings, I want to explore the question of what ‘Nietzsche today’ might mean for us today. At Cerisy in 1972, the meaning of Nietzsche was centred on the twin critiques of humanism and capitalism. While these issues persist, several articles in the 2016 collection indicate that they are now inflected through the vast contemporary significance of technology. One of the key debates here is Nietzsche’s significance for transhumanism. For Bernard Stiegler, transhumanism is the culmination of nihilism, understood as the reign of big data and the total quantification of the self. In this regard, he alludes to a ‘hypernihilism’ of the contemporary era, characterised by the quantifying effects of information technologies, which work in conjunction with capitalism to produce an ultimate ‘averaging’ force. I will argue that Stiegler gives an essential corrective to the largely critical engagements with neonihilism of the Nietzscheans of the previous generation, but that his emphasis on the value of negentropy risks reaffirming the logic of the transhumanism he critiques. Nietzscheanism today, I will argue, requires an appreciation of the dual tendencies of nihilism – identified here as neonihilism and hypernihilism – such that we must draw on contributions from both generations of French Nietzscheans in order to think and respond to the problems of our contemporary era. (shrink)

This article serves as the introduction to the Annual Review special section entitled ‘Bernard Stiegler and the Internation Project: Computational Practices and Circumscribed Futures’. As such, it introduces the collective undertaking of the Internation Project in relation to Stiegler’s long career as a thinker, educator and community organizer. The introduction pursues a number of themes addressed in the section’s contributions, including pharmacological logic, transindividuation, computational practices, bifurcation and negentropy (means of slowing entropic processes at individual and collective levels). All (...) of these themes pertain to the climate crises the world collectively faces and posit means by which futures can be conceived in less detrimental and destructive economic, social, technological and intellectual ways. The Internation Collective as represented and furthered in this special section responds to the demands of climate crises through a macroeconomic model designed to combat entropy at various scales, from the bio-chemical to the biosphere. (shrink)

In their article, ‘That is not dead which can eternal lie: the aestivation hypothesis for resolving Fermi’s paradox’, Sandberg et al. try to explain the Fermi paradox by claiming that Landauer’s principle implies that a civilization can in principle perform far more times more) irreversible logical operations if it conserves its resources until the distant future when the cosmic background temperature is very low. So perhaps aliens are out there, but quietly waiting. Sandberg et al. implicitly assume, however, that computer-generated (...) entropy can only be disposed of by transferring it to the cosmological background. In fact, while this assumption may apply in the distant future, our universe today contains vast reservoirs and other physical systems in non-maximal entropy states, and computer-generated entropy can be transferred to them at the adiabatic conversion rate of one bit of negentropy to erase one bit of error. This can be done at any time, and is not improved by waiting for a low cosmic background temperature. Thus aliens need not wait to be active. As Sandberg et al. do not provide a concrete model of the effect they assert, we construct one and show where their informal argument goes wrong. (shrink)

A derivation by Fröhner of non-relativistic quantum mechanics via Fourier analysis applied to probability theory is not extendable to relativistic quantum mechanics because Schrödinger's positive definite probability density ψ*ψ is lost (Dirac's spin 1/2 case being the exception). The nature of the Fourier link then changes; it points to a redefinition of the probability scheme as an information carrying telegraph, the code of which is Born's as extended by Dirac and by Feynman. Hermitian symmetry of the transition amplitude 〈ϕ∣ψ〉 between (...) Dirac representations expresses reciprocity of preparation and measurement (the quantal coding and decoding), two equally active interventions of the physicist; as “the measurement perturbs the system” retrodiction implies retroaction evidenced in “delayed choice.” Reciprocity of knowledge and organization vindicates Wigner's claim that “reciprocal to the action of matter upon mind there exists a direct action of mind upon matter”: psychokinesis, branded by Jaynes as “a psychiatric disorder of the Copenhagen school.” As for factlike irreversibility, it is expressed by the enormity of the change rate from information to negentropy: while gain in knowledge is normal psychokinesis is paranormal. Stapp's recent discussion of psychokinesis in a quantum context should be resumed in association with an EPR correlation; an experimental test is proposed. (shrink)

The Confederated Colville Tribes collaborated with DroneSeed, a forestry drone start-up, to use drones to replant their tribal forest after a devastating fire. Using concepts from Bernard Stiegler to interrogate ethnographic data, this article argues that forestry drones are pharmaka: their biopolitics can be therapeutic, that is, negentropic, capable of reversing ecological simplification. Drone forestry is a type of arborescent governmentality, a tree-based computer-coded attempt to control the growth of a forest. For the Colville, this negentropy is also an (...) act of sovereignty that protects culture and honors multispecies relationships. For DroneSeed, it is an experiment in negentropic geoengineering, an attempt to profitably leverage technologies and biological regeneration to sequester carbon and reduce global existential risk. Ultimately the project was not the success desired; the failure of technoliberal projects that blend ecological and economic liberalism shows that a more radical approach might be necessary to root carbon and slow capitalism. (shrink)

Religions, ideologies try to give a complete vision of the world a vision containing both its origin, explanation and a “normative kit”: a collection of precepts and rules, which should regulate human activities and behavior. Their synergetic meaning is clear: if embraced by all they allow for development of strong synergetic effects on the social macro scales. These in turn may lead to creation of order and beauty, of intellectual, spiritual and moral development within men and in society. In this (...) consist the elements of their natural—i.e. not explicitly reasoned out—wisdom. However, as they contain also some elements of harmful consequences—at least if they are literally accepted and in a fundamentalist manner practiced—they cannot be universally accepted. But—rejecting them we lose also the important sourcesof natural—or should we say instinctive—wisdom.Could the solution of this contradiction, of this one of the basic human sources of suffering be looked for in the modern science of complexity?Synergetics and the sciences of complex systems in general offer a solid scientific base for a meta-philosophical, universalist intellectual framework. Its offspring the social synergetics offers concrete propositions of optimized social structures. Optimized in the sense of espousing the main synergetic effects with being at the same time free of the negative “side effects” happening when religions or ideologies are the source of synergism.Finally a connection is discussed between the presented ideas and the concept of “love of wisdom”. The term “love of wisdom” may be understood as striving not only to possess a “sound and serene judgment regarding the conduct of life” but also a practical ability to act according to that judgment.This ability may be also expressed using the information-thermodynamic concepts of synergetics. Indeed without the ever continuing negentropy transformation neither survival of a complex system like man or society nor its continuing development—uncovering of all his “hidden potentials” is possible.To assure maximization of this transformation process creation of strong synergetic effects—of reinforcement, of positive feedback—between all human beings—i.e. not excluding any nations, any social groups, and any individuals—are necessary. Acting towards local and global realization of such a structure everywhere on our planet constitutes the essence of social wisdom.Removing all obstacles towards this goal—obstacles existing on the intellectual, emotional and spiritual level—should be one of the most important tasks of various institutions, of state structures, of purified from mythical elements ideologies, of man oriented sciences and above all of the modern universalism.Thus striving towards its realization is an expression of the love of wisdom. Of wisdom once based on the elements of mythos and now regained in the full light of Logos. (shrink)

This is a commentary piece on Marco Pavanini's article ' ‘Multistability and Derrida’s Différance: Investigating the Relations Between Postphenomenology and Stiegler’s General Organology' in which I critically extend upon his comparative analysis of postphenomenology''s notion of multistability and Stiegler's conception of organology, focusing in particular on the pharmacological nature of Stiegler's organology and the latter's most recent re-interpretation of it in terms of entropy and negentropy. Among other things I show, and both are more intended as additions than criticisms (...) with respect to Pavanini’s very helpful comparison, that the most important concern for Stiegler in theorizing technology is the fact that the transductive relations between the three organ systems distinguished in his pharmaco-organology of technology open up affective or libidinal circuits between these systems, i.e., circuits either of desire or drive depending on the way the pharmakon is adopted or not, and that these circuits are fundamentally noetic circuits vulnerable to denoetization; and that these libidinal-noetic circuits as conditioned by technology should be interpreted in terms of entropy and negentropy. Both insights are lacking in postphenomenology, which generally fails to consider the irreducibly destitutive character of all technology, rightfully emphasized by Pavanini, since it lacks a genuine pharmacological awareness. (shrink)

The paper will be divided into two parts. In the first part concerning teleological order in nature, different types of order will be distinguished: beginning with order as structure and then proceeding to higher and stronger types of order, which include special arithmetical and geometrical relations and eventually also negentropy. It will be shown that certain processes of becoming can possess higher order in such a way that they can have teleological order. In the second part a definition of (...) teleological explanation will be given and the following two questions will be answered: Are there teleological explanations which are logically valid? Are there teleological explanations which are used by scientists? (shrink)

Resolution of the entropy‐evolution problem was a significant issue for Pierre Teilhard de Chardin throughout his scientific career. Although never truly satisfied with his solution, he proposed that all energy must be psychic and contain two components. Tangential energy is related to physical energy. Radial energy in some way accounts for increasing complexity and consciousness in evolution. Analysis of developments in thermodynamics, statistical mechanics, and information theory show that Gibbs free energy contains both calorimetric and noetic components, thus validating Teilhard's (...) intuition. (shrink)

This paper briefly review a current trend in neuroscience aiming to combine neurophysiological and physical concepts in order to understand the emergence of spatio-temporal patterns within brain activity by which brain constructs knowledge from multiple streams of information. The authors further suggest that the meanings, which subjectively are experienced as thoughts or perceptions can best be described objectively as created and carried by large fields of neural activity within the operational architectonics of brain functioning.

This article discusses the relation between the institutions and the production of entropy as read by Bernard Stiegler and locates this discussion within a more specific debate on institutions in advanced capitalism. Commenting on Stiegler’s approach to the concept of entropy, the article brings into focus the institutional strand of Stiegler’s increasingly hurried writings where this concept is discussed and reframes his critique of political economy as ‘neganthropology’ in relation to what I describe as neganthropic institutions. A full explanation of (...) Stiegler’s positive project of neganthroplogy is offered through an inherent critique of Friedrich Hayek’s economic theory and of his view on institutions. I show that Hayek’s approach to institutions largely stems from his understanding of the theory of biological evolution, which is fundamentally flawed because it neglects the question of entropy with regard to the organisation of the living in general and of the human species in particular. (shrink)

During the refereeing procedure of Anthropomorphic Quantum Darwinism by Thomas Durt, it became apparent in the dialogue between him and me that the definition of information in Physics is something about which not all authors agreed. This text aims at describing the concepts associated to information that are accepted as the standard in the Physics world community.