A Philosophical Investigation of Entropy

“No one truly understands entropy.” David Newman (loosely paraphrased)

            When I first heard these words in class, I was intrigued and decided to make it my personal mission to understand entropy and what about it makes it such an elusive concept to grasp. What I found strange was if entropy was such a difficult concept, how is it that we are able to solve systems using entropy and calculate relative values for entropy in a system? It seemed to me that if we can use entropy to better understand the universe, we must have a pretty good understanding of what entropy is. But at the same time, there must be a reason why people often say that entropy is a difficult concept.

            To get a better understanding of entropy, I decided to take a philosophical approach rather than a mathematical approach. Basically, what this means is that instead of trying to lay out mathematical equations illustrating the process of entropy, I will simply ask questions about entropy through linguistic analysis, which is a method of understanding a concept through how the word that denotes the concept is used in a language. Understanding how entropy is used as a word is key to understanding entropy itself. This assumption is jumping across hundreds of years of philosophic debate starting from Descartes who challenged all of what we know and what we can know through the senses.  Unfortunately, I cannot go into all the details of how we can make this assumption, but I will try and give a quick outline of the basic problem.

            Descartes asks us if we ever had a dream where we are unsure if we are awake or dreaming. He then states that even if we are sure we are awake, it is still possible that we are dreaming. Then he creates a hypothetical evil demon that corrupts not only our senses, but our emotions, our beliefs, and our memories. Everything that arises in the mind then becomes susceptible to doubt. But something that cannot be doubted is the fact that I think that I think something. In other words, “I see an apple” can be doubted, but “I think I see an apple” cannot be doubted. This is where the famous phrase “I think therefore, I am” comes from. From there, Descartes attempts to create an indubitable, firm foundation for knowledge.

            The obvious problem with Descartes’s thought experiment is that we live day to day with perfect confidence that what we experience is true without any doubts. But how is it that we are sure that what we experience is not a figment of some demon’s imagination? Let’s say that you have a friend, Bob. He is a very good friend but no one seems to be able to see him. This troubles you so much that you decide to see a doctor. Sorry, but Bob does not exist, off to the mental hospital you go. But you can argue why we reject your experience in favor of everyone else’s? The answer to this is the basis of logical positivism and also for the scientific method. An object, a principle, a situation needs to be verifiable before we can accept as a fact. But this still does not answer the question of how we can accept that there are other people that can verify what you experience. (An interesting answer to this question, and also to the idea that humans have free will is from Jean-Paul Sartre, and I recommend reading the book Being or Nothingness.)

            One answer is given by the private language argument, which states that there can be no private language. The words that are used and the rules of grammar must be used by a community of language users. Let me explain this in more depth with Wittgenstein’s Beetle in a Box thought experiment. Let us pretend that everyone in a classroom has a “beetle in a box.” No one has ever shown their “beetle” to any of their classmates, but they are all sure that what they have in their box is a beetle. The question then is, does the word, “beetle,” have any meaning? You can try defining beetle by saying, it is the thing inside the box, but that does not answer the question of what the thing is; this respons only gives the thing a location.  The truth is that the “beetle” in this case is a meaningless concept and the point Wittgenstein is trying to make, I think, is that the word “beetle” would never have been created unless everyone using that language knew what it is the word “beetle” is referring to. This thought experiment is addressing the classic philosophical argument which states that my sensations are private and that no one else has access to them (e.g., no one can know my pain but myself). But this idea can be applied to all private language arguments.

            In a way, entropy can be thought of as a kind of beetle in a box (though the analogy is not perfect), in that we use the word “entropy” blindly without really understanding what the other person is referring to when they speak of it. So far, I have not yet begun my analysis of entropy, I have simply been attempting to provide the justification that a linguistic analysis of entropy is sufficient for an understanding of entropy itself. While this justification is not at all complete, it will be
enough for what I am trying to accomplish, which is have an understanding of what entropy is.