VIBRATIONS
VIBRATIONS
ANNOTATING:
|...| W. James, Pragmatism 1907
The difference that makes a difference:
Samuel Butler's intuition would be more thoroughly articulated in the following decades, as the discourse of ‘radiation’ became current and, as a result, the discourse of negative entropy could be more easily articulated. William James’ first used the term the ‘difference that makes a difference’ (phrase later used extensively by Gregory Bateson to define "information")in 1907 in relation to the anti-entropic properties of radiation. This newly discovered entity, evidenced in radium, seemed to defy the second law of thermodynamics and “pay out of its own pocket” [1] In Pragmatism (1907) William James stated: “there can be no difference anywhere that doesn’t make a difference elsewhere – no difference in abstract truth that doesn’t express itself in a difference in concrete fact and in conduct consequent upon that fact, imposed on somebody, somehow, somewhere and somewhen. The whole function of philosophy ought to be to find out what definite difference it will make to me and you, at definite instants of our life, if this world-formula or that world-formula be the true one.[”[2] In highlighting for the difference that makes a difference James was trying to account for precisely the problematic that Butler had encountered – an unaccounted proliferation of order within an entropic universe. To stress the urgency of the nineteenth-century energy deficit, James cites a particularly energised substance discovered around the time of writing Pragmatism: “‘Radium’ came the other day as part of the day’s content, and seemed for a moment to contradict the ideas of the whole order of nature, that order having come to be identified with what is called conservation of energy. The mere sight of radium paying heat away indefinitely out of its own pocket seemed to violate that conservation.[3]
James here identifies the problem which centres around the relation between energy and information.
Note: Lacan, in Seminar II, would liken this fracture in the discourse of the nineteenth century to a “rabbit being pulled out of a hat”, a trick that appears to confounded the second law of thermodynamics. Here the world is regulated by difference on a material and semiotic level (which is to say, on the biological level, a difference affords adaptation; on the level of language a statement affords change). Following the publication of Wiener (1948) and Shannon’s (1948) work on information and (neg)entropy it was clear why a difference could make a difference and how the abstract truth could be expressed in a concrete fact. It was clear about the “definite difference it will make to me and you, at definite instants of our life” that these differences are bound to the choices we make in the information economies we inhabit.But even given this clarity, we can see that in the time of Samuel Butler the relationship between evolution, purpose, difference and mind were entangled. Already, in the age of steam, the elements necessary for a comprehensive materialist, cybernetic theory of mind were present. James’ contemporary, William Bateson working in the new field of genetics, would also seek to account for this previously unaccounted surplus.