(This post is inspired by dipping into people like Heinz von Foerster, Scott Kelso, Mike Turvey, Francesco Varela, and many others, including the modest, but so insightful, Wei Wu Wei.)

When I first heard cognitive scientists talk about thermodynamics, I was perplexed.  I did not see what this arcane belief in physics had to do with cognition.  It has taken a while to dawn on me.  The second law is the one that says that entropy, or disorder, must increase in a closed system, such as, for example, the whole frigging universe.  And it’s a peculiar law.  There is no experiment you can do to test it, as the only closed system is, many believe, that which we call the whole universe.  It is more of a belief.  And it is a peculiar belief too.  Scientists cling to it dearly, and it underwrites the distinction between far-from-equilibrium systems, like life forms, from the dead stuff, which has a tendency to fall apart.  Believe me, I know.  Most scientists, I fear, have no idea why they subscribe to this belief.  It’s just taken to be the thing we know absolutely.  But, if we hold our knowledge of it as true or false in abeyance for a moment, what exactly hangs on this issue?  What does the question mean?

My own understanding of the relevance of the question came about thus: As I studied movement, and coordination, I came to see that we must understand time if we are to understand that which we are.  Because the arrow of time–which is our favorite story about the eternal present–is the fabric upon which intentional behavior is woven.  Things that are meaningfully coordinated provide scintillating, alternative operationalizations of the notion of time.  Define lawful change, or a dynamic, so, and you see one kind of regularity.  Define it another way, and different things come into focus.  The locus of agency shifts as you redefine time, and questions of the locus of agency and our belief in ourselves as subjective agents, are two sides of the same coin.

The second law of thermodynamics is the belief that there is one way to measure the arrow of time.  It is the only foundation stone of physics where time is necessarily directional, and the direction is given by the concept of order or structure.  Here, too, we see a belief that that which deserves the appellation ”real”  is that which is revealed if we get our notion of time right.

Heinz von Foerster seems to have a nice illustration that if we subscribe to the arrow of time, as defined by the Second Law, to be a description of the universe, then there can be no self-organizing system, no entity that is worthy of the name “real”.  Here a link remains to be made to the experiential domain.   The subject.  For von Foerster, like I, does not buy into the notion of Mind, that is distinct from an outside world.  As he says in his introduction to the book Understanding Understanding,

I am unhappy with this discrimination between objective and subjective: How do I know the objects? Where are they? Of course, I can reconfirm or establish a rich connection with an object by touching or by smelling it or talking about it, and so I had the idea to make the object a representation of the activity or behavior of the observer, instead of the passive being looked or just sitting there.

He speaks here of the impossibility of finding the subjective if you insist on one definition of time, or, equivalently, of objectivity.  Of course self-organizing systems can be identified, but each requires a different definition of time.  This relativizes their claims to be the origin of agentive cause.

Wei Wu Wei, as ever, is very clear about this:

As long as anyone tacitly accepts Time either as really existing, or even as the basis of consideration, he is only concerning himself with objectivity.  (source)

We are witnessing the birth of a new theory of the person: the Non-Cartesian view. This view eschews solipsistic thought while paying respectful dues to the notion of the phenomenal. It is a fundamental shift in perspective that encourages us to read our own lives and world as collectively constituted out of the multiple patterns of coordination we live in. The notion of agency is reduced to an admission of ignorance and a recognition that the only possible agreement on this topic is one of consensus.

This view must be contrasted with the Cartesian view, to establish which frame of reference is being used. Neither may claim an absolute hold on truth. Only so can we harbour hopes of creating a Human Science.

If you believe in something called “motor control”, then the non-volitional action underlying the concept of Wu Wei will appear odd.

Imagine a busy road in which many cars manage to drive at high speed, without crashing. If now, one driver makes a very serious error, his car goes places it should not go, maybe turning over, and crashing. In a conventional account, we say he “lost control”. In the account suggested here, you might better say he “regained control”. For all those cars that do not crash, clearly they are not being controlled. Rather, they are integrated as components within a larger system, the trafic flow. The conditions that allow optimal traffic flow include clear road markings, good visibility, road-worthy cars, non-drunken drivers, etc. When one driver crashes, that system has collapsed, and the car is now acting independently. So the car+driver system has, in a slightly odd sense, reasserted its autonomy, made itself independent, and regained control. But with that, there is clumsiness, ineffectiveness, and a crash.

Wu wei is action without the clumsiness of a locus of control.

Postscript: This distinction parallel’s Terrence Deacon’s account of orthograde and contragrade processes. The cars that act as components within a superordinate domain of autonomy illustrate the former. The car that makes itself independent, and then collides with and threatens the domain of ordered driving, illustrates the contragrade.