The Embracing Flows: Process and Structure in the Moverments of Information and Energy

Broadly speaking, information has something to do with order or organization within a system of elements. The thermodynamic concept of entropy is also associated with such systems, although in an inverse relationship. When we attempt to put these two apparently coordinated schemas of order and disorder together, all kinds of difficulties arise. I will briefly examine contemporary efforts to unify these two ways of conceiving order and show that they are substantially incompatible. In this process I will draw some distinctions that will lead to a broader reconciliation of the concepts of order and information. I will then attempt to reevaluate the fundamental models behind these dissonant traditions for formulating order in an attempt to reframe a synthesis of conceptual structures that are mutually reconcilable. I will try to show that such a synthesis can finally make sense of the stubborn inconsistencies that persist in the ways Newtonian dynamics, thermodynamics and biology utilize the implicitly conflicting arrows of time.