[People] allow themselves to be blinded … seven florins only were allowed to defray expenses twice as great. … people who believed, without any visible astonishment, that their house possessed the prophet’s never-failing cruse of oil.
(Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther).
This thesis on flux and identity “Heraclitian Flux and Identity through Change” (download free pdf below) was completed at the University of Queensland (UQ) under the excellent and supremely patient supervision of Dominic Hyde. It was submitted in 2007. Graham Priest, Gary Malinas and Mark Colyvan also did some supervisory duties and gave me some good ideas. There are two reasons I now put the PDF online.
The first is simple: because otherwise it is stuck behind the UQ paywall. This does not even benefit the UQ as far as I can tell. So putting it here does no harm to the university, though to be honest I would not care if it did. More to the point it does not help anyone being paywalled from the world.
How does it help being free? Today I would say that the thesis considers persisting objects as systems not in thermodynamic equilibrium, being subject to the flux of matter-energy to and from other systems. It must be added that I was not aware of the relevant terminology of “non-equilibrium” systems at the time. What I did understand is that this approach is both scientific given the importance of thermodynamics at all levels of scientific investigation, and commonsensical, as we find Heraclitus presciently indicating in the earlier chapters. Yet today philosophers often think of objects as primarily worms or stages through spacetime, with studies in thermodynamics doing no more than helping us describe properties possessed by the worms etc. This worm view is contested in the later chapters of the thesis.
Mark Colyvan once warned me that the term “Chaos Theory” denoted a discourse more popularist than professional. While Mark may have been right, and while this concerned me in my effort to get the degree, it no longer concerns me. In so far as Chaos Theory takes leave from thermodynamics I am happy if the thesis plays a role in such a genre. Perhaps a very modest if also metaphysically preliminary role, in that a generalised understanding of changes in objects is basic, preliminary to investigations or observations about specific types of changing objects like tables, chairs, galaxies, mountains or biospheres.
The study of thermodynamics is crucial to our understanding of how we are impacting on our environment. If not reduce specific details of temperatures, winds or rains to joules etc, thinking within the Laws of Thermodynamics underwrites our understanding of all these things and more. It does so by underwriting our understanding of how more generally we take energy from the environment to fight entropy, and dissipate waste back into that environment. So preliminaries around the basic issue of changing generic objects as non-equilibrium thermodynamic systems would allow us to understand what we mean by object in a way that informs an ecologically-friendly view of the world.
Today we are being forced to see the biosphere in thermodynamic terms. Why not, as a consequence of the view of persistence presented in the thesis, just do the same for chairs and glasses of water, and indeed for all changing objects from atoms to galactic clusters? Conversely, as capitalism has more recklessly expanded up against the limits of exploitation, it has become fashionable for pro-capitalists to downplay the need to think within the confines of studies in thermodynamics (e.g. Stephen Wolfram, Sabine Hossenfelder). On this false perspective, the economy is a perpetual motion machine, and there is no ecological or social metabolic impediments to endless economic growth. If people are locked into pro-capitalist thinking, that could explain an unjustified and institutional bias against a view based primarily on studies in thermodynamics.
The dismissal or even denial of thermodynamics is an interesting phenomenon on both a social and personal level, as we find on the personal in the Goethe quote above. Against it, it is important to realise that the basic issue of objecthood tells us, both commonsensically and philosophically, that it is mistaken to deny the need for a world-view informed by thermodynamics.
Dyslexic Writings by Gerald Keaney 