Oct 28 2007
Entropy
It seems that in many things in life you start with two elements, put them together and sometimes you get a reaction and some times you don’t. Often you need a catalyst, sometimes the reaction starts and ends in a flash or explosion, if you’re lucky you were wearing your lab coat and safety goggles.
When reactions happen too quickly it can be difficult to really capture what happened. What went right and what went wrong. When reactions are slower it’s harder to really see what IS happening and you have to be more precise with your measurement and attentiveness. While these two extremes exist, I find that that reactions between two people that sustain for awhile start out with a ton of energy, rapid creation of something new and then they reach an inflection point where they either keep building or suffer from a heat entropy. The entropy is characterized by a gradual cooling of things, less time spent together, more ‘me’ vs. ‘you’ and less ‘us’ thinking, less communication and ultimately the reaction ceases all together.
While I have a good idea how the entropy comes to be, it’s less clear to me if you can successfully add in a new catalyst or new element to reverse the entropy and get things going again. Can you get past all of the by product (good and bad) of the initial reaction and resulting entropy.
Are sustainable reactions nurtured? Tended to? Naturally occurring? or are they more scientific, do you have to put a bunch of instrumentation in place, constantly measuring the ‘health’ of the reaction. The romantic in me likes to think that the underlying reaction needs to be self-sustaining, needs to be fueled off the compatibility of the two elements and not the constant tinkering of someone in a white coat, but I can’t seem to find any real hard evidence to support this theory so I guess I’ll don my coat and goggles and see if the reaction is ‘tinker-able’ or if I need to find a new element to explore.
Schweet!
Have you come across Maturana’s autopoeisis? It’s a lot like what de Chardin had to say about how things strive upwards. (I’ve never found a good way of expressing that stuff … I really don’t want to get into stuff like teleology, though I’m fond of Buckminster Fuller’s “tensegrity”. Is why the new domain I started is ProTension, just grappling with this.)
The best I’ve read is from a venerable old Sanskritist / dharma translator by the name of Herbert Guenther. I had the chance to talk to him over supper one evening at a monastery; I got into how “dynamically balanced systems restore themselves after passing through a chaotic phase by way of feed-back/feed-forward” and he, without missing a beat, offered that they “digest entropy”. Yaa, like that!
cheers
p.s. this is the first time in my life I ever register on another individual’s WP … this feels like an illicit thrill! *grin*
p.s.2 sure do wish WP offered preview