Alignment ⑩ entropy

best to think of entropy as a concept that contains our measures

Oct 07, 2025

It is best to think of entropy as a concept that contains our measures. All those units we labour to name and divide up the world of our experience with, the flow we struggle in.

Decades ago in the mid-80s I lived on a 70s hippie community on the unforgiving Monaro of New South Wales.

A city hippie visited from Sydney and stayed in a caravan on the windy hilltop. He communed with the universe by drumming out into the night sky, while dressed in a dark lime green one-piece jump bike-shorts-with-top thing. He came down from his caravan on the mountain late one afternoon, but still up there. He proclaimed to us in the common kitchen, “Entropy is the rust on time.”

I let him go back up the hill to his Newtownian reveries. Then I said to the others, “without entropy there is no time”.

I was 20 years old or something. Let’s call it 1985.

Then in 2015 having just read the following:

Our reasons for continuing to fight vanish. Instead of simply siding with one over the other, we can consider our universe filled with clocks, equations, and science as much as with dreams, memories, and laughter. From Jimena Canales’s The Physicist & the Philosopher: Einstein, Bergson, and the Debate That Changed Our Understanding of Time. Princeton University Press, 2017.

I then wrote some notes on that 1980s memory. It had a lot more details, like names and other measures, other meanings. More facts as dreams.

I also added, “thought about that memory yesterday. How the movie Donnie Darko came out the year my daughter was born and we watched it on her 13th birthday.”

She is now in 2025 reading in Oxford.

Without entropy there is no time.

Years later, I ‘now’ add, that without the indwelling complexity that allows us to prefer one way or another, there is no entropy, that loose container loosens order among us as real dream. It has it’s power.

But, as the clock in the children’s novel Tom’s Midnight Garden by Philippa Pearce says ‘time no longer’.

Or if you want to annoy that rusty old hippie, you could say entropy doesn’t even…

According to Julian Barbour what we call entropy is part of the ‘function’ of which there is also something we call complexity. In that we find enough time to dream or count. After that, somewhere along the way it includes memory, code and consciousness, and this latter selfing thing, is something which we often strip out in science only then to forget we are animals. Or, as if in a dream, we assume too much in that this, our animality, explains everything.

It is best to think of entropy as a concept that contains our measures. All those units we labour to name and divide up the world of our experience with, the flow we struggle in.

We grasp and in that moment we grapple with what has been and what will be lost. But this is better than to have never lived at all.

Crossposted from whyweshould.loofs-samorzewski.com