Put simply, entropy is whatever default attractor within which any “bulk” or unformed matter finds itself embedded. We think of it as “negative” or destructive because we are self-rooted to our functions, and because we don’t see the larger syntropic forms it is being induced to assume.
In Spinozan terms, and even more simply, when an object has no essence, it takes on the essence of its parent. Or, more nuanced, there is a fractal interplay of essences (attractors), and to really play in the inter-play one must “tap into” these nascent and emergent forms in the actual-possible. One must play in the stream of Becoming and harness one’s own flows autocatalytically to its own form and Being.
And for the crude simple machines used in cobbling together our science of thermodynamics, the default essence or attractor is that of the Earth, namely the fine or deep electrogravitational structure of the atmosphere….which is mostly ergodic, or noise, to our senses.
My view, as with Fuller, is that we’ve come in through the “attic window” on practically everything (trans-trans bound), math, science, reality. And the matter we are playing with in mechanics, from the outside, is bulk, crude, relatively un(in)formed. This is basically what Deleuze’s Transcendental Empiricism gets at… that we are already “infinitely” transcendent observers (infinite in a key aspect, but also not in another). And this is also the meaning of the move to the infinite Leibnizian-Deleuzian “fold” (near the end of SZ).
So we come out from, and into a boundary, a world, as a part of this infinite fractal boundary-mechanics, these divinely enfolded, unfolding recursive self-hoods or sheathings of self. From this lofty perch, we then start dabbling in the creation process, but from waaaay up here, as ‘one,’ with these impossibly huge fingers, grasping massive chunks of matter and slapping them around. And then we wonder why our machines, our would-be golems can’t even keep it together, let alone walk… until now as we dig into the micro of the mechanical onion.
Or you could say that we open our eyes through connecting lines of sight stretching across an infinite plane, and assume, implicitly that the world is made out of lines and planes, and then proceed to discover the limits, balances, and uses of crossing these lines at right angles. A classic Fullerian shift from transitivity to immanence as we fall into our own implicit singularity, get our bearings and float…finally engaging our hands into the flow of our Being.
Until the current involution and dis-closure into the complexity at source, we had not realized what a “Form” (Spinozan essence) was. We assumed that the universe should just want to maintain the forms that we throw together. We were confused that matter seems inactive (from way above), and we assumed that she was not interested in her own ideas and play. And so we forced our forms upon her in our simple machines. As Leibniz notes, however, our machines are not recursive infinite machines, as are Nature’s. They have no flux within them focused naturally into maintaining any form (essence), except for the deeper bulk material essence of which they are fashioned, smelted, pressed, or whatever. In other words, bulk matter has its own intrinsic attractors, and shares those of the parent attractor within which it finds itself. And so it “seeks” to merge with its essence, both inwardly (back to bulk) and outwardly, off into “space”…or crumbling into the “ground”.
And this puts a spin on Taoist ‘non-action’, as the aligning with your dominant attractors and your total harmonic essence. Going with the flow. Crude mechanics simply does not, of itself, so the flow goes away with it, because that larger and smaller (I/T) flow is its actual essence. It persists in its real being, which we have mis-identified with itself.
This is the key to entropy. A function of an eclipsed view into a play of attractors. Spinozan existential essences which are preceded by (emergent from) existence. This gets down to the labyrinthine nature of continuity, the deep fine structure and intelligence in matter. It has its own forms in dealing with its own infinite perfection, as we should know, BEING these forms and all. Barely coming to grips with the ordering forces from this deep labyrinthine chaos of pure continuity, we get confused by the “negative” gradient from our own top-down impositions, and we assign it an ideal, a Law, and fit a curve to it with some equations. And then naturally we project those Ideals onto the cosmos and predict it’s “heat death” in dramatic form.