Driftwork

Occasionally people ask what the origins of the concept of equivalence are in the work I’m engaged in, usually I find the act of answering this strange response difficult. The reply tends to depend on what we are interested in at the time ranging from the usual sources within the philosophies of difference that have struggled to address the problem of equality and ethics within the area, through to psychoanlytical and socio-political conceptualizations.

However and this is merely a personal-historical placeholder - over the weekend I reread Monad’s Chance and Necessity, an unusual ‘memory’ from the 1970s and came across the following on the second law of thermodynamics and information theory: “…So much has been written on the meaning of the second law, on entropy, on the ‘eqivalence’between negative entropy and information..” and later “…The degree of order of order in a system is definable under certain conditions in another language: that of information. The order of a system, in such terms, is equal to the the quantity of information required for a description of that system…Whence the idea of a certain eqivalence between ‘information’ and ‘negantropy’…”

Though it’s scarcely understandable why from the brief quotes, still it would not be illegitimate to recognize that the brief appendix on the second law marks one of the points of origin of the concept of ‘equivalence’. Though whether it was read in these terms in the 70s or early 80s I’m really unsure because it’s been reconstructed so many times since then.