MAXIMUM ENTROPY...

JONATHAN: “If science is to encompass what is now called metaphysical it will be because the metaphysical ...will stop being hidden and become publically, communicably and verifiably vealed...and therefore physical. I see no reason why this may not happen, but suspect this will require a transfiguration of that consciousness that lies behind and determines the potentiality of the senses.”

Which takes us forward to the totality of things. The state at which the universe is conceived to be devoid of structure, where the degree of randomness is infinite, and where everything that involves expenditure of energy, however slight, has come to a halt. This is the
point at which no further information may be added. And I would certainly accept a considerable amount of intellectual nothing in return for this rather
comprehensive, this rather infinitive, metaphysical condition that I believe we
are striving towards for the next ten-billion years.

This is not an essay in ontology, but the most irritating form of the
tenet that absolute knowledge is essential to metaphysical perfection is that
which asserts that total ignorance must be a form of imperfection. One thing is
certainly beyond conjecture, knowledge, like entropy, does always increase. And
we are talking here about the second law of thermodynamics, a fundamental
feature of which is the total energy distribution in a closed system. Entropy is
a measure of the disorganization of the universe which, due to irreversible
energy transfers, must always increase. To illustrate this, suppose that the
universe is winding down, to use a peculiarly expressive colloquialism, the
eventual outcome being a heat death. Or, as the physicist would put it, a state
in which organization is absent and temperature distribution uniform. There is
no possibility of repeal, the entropy of a closed system can never decrease.

Entropy, of course, is also a property of information theory: average
information transfer per symbol, as defined by a formally related distribution
ratio. As symbol and symptom of a twentyfirst-century phenomenon, it takes on a
more familiar and ominous form in the fragmentation of knowledge. And viewed
from this quantified perspective, not only matter and energy, but knowledge
itself would be fragmentary, bitty and disconnected. Hence, total intellectual
entropy would be a measure of the amount of information that was infinitely
subdivided, examined from every possible angle, and dissolved or refined out of
existence. For all things must end. How can one add further information to all
that one can possibly know. Perfection itself cannot add anything to itself. The
mind of man in its last phase is at the hour of perfect noon. Of course, death
plays a part. If the size of the universe is a measure of human consciousness,
total intellectual entropy equates the death of the universe with a return to
the unconscious. The era of homo sapiens is at an end.

Only when these developments have been accomplished, can we hope to
resolve those doubts about the design and purpose of the universe which the
various natural sciences do not purport to settle. But if we think of the
‘running-down’ or the ‘heat-death’ of the universe as a measure of ultimate
disorder greater than the uniformity of distribution in the conventional concept
of vacuum, the idea of complementary intellectual development may not seem too
great a leap of the imagination. Taken literally, it is of course an
insufficient endowment upon which to ground an empirical evolutionary theory.
Indeed, our knowledge of this development, observational and theoretical, is so
foreshortened that it is not as yet possible, on the other hand, to interpret
past observations in terms of long-term future hypotheses nor, on the other, to
dismiss the assumption altogether according to which, after billions of years,
there will no longer by any relativistic distinction between one individual and
another.

There may be those who find such a proposition nonsensical. Nothing
objectionable about that. Full comprehension of it, paradoxically, can exist
only when the evolution of the intellect has reached a stage of perfection that
is humanly unimaginable. Of course only time will tell, but there is no known
reason why the condition of maximum intellectual entropy, however complex it may
seem, should be materially and cosmologically but not mentally and ideally
applicable.

Dreamy