Evoking Maxwell's Demon

Evoking Maxwell's demon 1
Evoking Maxwell's demon.
The following can be read as a continuation of 'Otters and Oak Trees' written in 2001. This
described an encounter with an otter which took place on the edge of the National Trust for
Scotland's Threave Estate. About a mile upstream of Lamb Island is another, larger island upon
which is a castle. It was built for Archibald the Grim sometime after 1369 and is called Threave
Castle. In 1872, a Liverpool merchant called William Gordon bought what was then called Kelton
Estate. To replace the old farmhouse of Kelton Mains, Gordon built a mock-baronial house
overlooking the castle and named it Threave House. In 1764/5, a military road from Gretna to
Portpatrick was built. It was replaced by a turnpike road in 1799/1800, but a section of the Old
Military Road sill survives between Kelton Mains and Threave House.
According to local folklore, somewhere in a dry-stane dyke (wall) on the Old Military Road near
Threave House is a stone with the date '1724' carved on it. This commemorates an encounter
between the Galloway Levellers and the laird of Kelton. In the summer of 1724, the Levellers were
busy levelling all the newly built dykes they could find, but after the laird of Kelton explained that
this dyke was just the boundary of the highway and that none of his tenants would be evicted (and a
bribe of bread and beer), the dyke was left standing. It is a good story and so, after I had persuaded
the makers of a BBC Scotland radio series on the Lowland Clearances to include the Galloway
Levellers, it was dramatised for one of the episodes in 2003. One of the producers even found the
very stone while recording an interview with me on the Old Military Road... but on closer
inspection although it was a stone with a date on it, the numbers were 175? not 1724.
The radio series was then written up as a book with a chapter on the Galloway Levellers. Unlike
the Highland Clearances, the Lowland Clearances are not well known, even in Scotland. Following
on from the defeat of Bonnie Prince Charlie's Jacobites at Culloden, and associated with the
suppression of Scotland's Gaelic culture, the Highland Clearances have become part of Scotland's
popular history. They also get a mention in volume one of Karl Marx's Capital, as a then recent
example of the 'Expropriation of the Agricultural Population from the Land' (in Part 8, chapter 27).
Marx's argument was that so long as poor peasants had at least some access to land, they would
rather eke out a living in the countryside than move to cities where they had to work for others to
buy food rather than grow their own. The enclosure of common land in England was part of this
process, as were the Highland Clearances.
Unfortunately this process doesn't work with the Highland Clearances. The main wave of clearances
took place in the early nineteenth century, by which time the industrial revolution in Scotland and
England was already well under way. With the Lowland Clearances, their late eighteenth century
timing fits better, but the Galloway Levellers uprising in 1724 was too early. What their actions did
help inspire, via the Honourable Society of Improvers of Knowledge in Agriculture in Scotland was
the setting up of an early economic development agency -the Board of Trustees for the
Improvement of Manufacturing – in 1727. Its aim was to improve the Scottish economy which had
still not greatly benefited from the Union of 1707 – a fact exploited by the Scottish Jacobites. The
fear was that Scotland's impoverished masses might rise up in support of the Jacobites. The Board
of Trustees did not make any dramatic improvements, but the idea of 'social improvement through
economic development' it embodied became absorbed into the Scottish Englightenment.
In rough outline, the theory was that Scotland was poorer than England because it was closer to the
barbarous past, it was stuck at an earlier stage of development. This failure was rubbed in by the
Jacobite rebellion of 1745/6, when even the best educated and civil of Scots found themselves
lumped in with barbarous Highlanders by the English. The shock of the Jacobite rebellion helped
drive the Scottish Enlightenment forward as Scotland's ruling elite desperately tried to prove that
they were as civilised as their English peers. The great wave of 'improvement' which followed was
not confined to the Scottish universities, it was also built into the environment – in Edinburgh's
rationally planned New Town and across the estates of Scottish landowners. The Lowland
Clearances were part of this transformation and, at least in some cases, the enlightened estate
owners also started new industrial developments including linen, woollen and cotton mills as well
as lime kilns and iron works. From the 1760s onwards, the Union with England was also beginning
to pay off as Scots merchants, traders, doctors, soldiers and sailors began to profit from the
colonisation of North America and the conquest of India. For the lucky few, huge profits could be
made through crude exploitation – but through the purchase of land and then improving their new
estates, the impression of civilised gentility could be created.
The intellectual ferment of the Scottish Enlightenment is represented in the works of David Hume
and Adam Smith. The same ferment led an instrument maker who worked for the University of
Glasgow to try and improve a model steam engine he had been given to repair. This was James Watt
and the improvements he made to the efficiency of steam engines stimulated Britain's industrial
revolution. Crucially, Watt's practical engineering skills were combined with an interest in what was
to become the science of thermodynamics.
Complications
Before proceeding further, I need to go back to my Galloway Levellers research. What I found was
that the Galloway Levellers were not peasants resisting agricultural improvement. They had no
problem with the idea of improvement or with enclosures. Their actions were directed against a few
landowners who were illegally importing Irish cattle and one in particular who was also a Jacobite
supporter. Then, a generation later, when the process of agricultural improvement began in earnest,
efforts were made to find employment for the cottars and crofters no longer needed to work the
land. In one case, a whole new industrial town complete with water powered cotton mills was built.
To begin with the cotton mills were a success, employing 500 workers, but by 1840 they could no
longer compete with the steam powered mills of Manchester and were closed.
I then found that the two largest cotton mills in Manchester were owned by John Kennedy and
James McConnell and Adam and George Murray – who were farmers; sons from Galloway. They
had all moved south to become apprentices in the 1780s, working for another Galloway farmer's
son who was a textile machine maker at Chowbent near Manchester. After serving their
apprenticeships, they started up as machine makers in the 1790s in Manchester before becoming
cotton spinners themselves. By 1815 McConnell and Kennedy and A and G Murray each employed
over 100 workers and had the two largest cotton spinning businesses in Manchester. John Kennedy
then went on to join the Liverpool and Manchester Railway Committee and act as a judge at the
Rainhill Trials in 1829. Both firms specialised in producing high quality cotton thread. Higher
quality thread required faster spinning machines and the firms led the way in gearing up Watt's
steam engine to achieve this. Boulton and Watt's Manchester representative at this time was Peter
Ewart – who also came from Galloway. His brother William Ewart had moved to Liverpool where
his business partner was John Gladstone, father of the Victorian politician William Ewart Gladstone,
William Ewart was his godfather. Altogether, over a dozen of these economic migrants from
Galloway became leading merchants and manufactures in Liverpool and Manchester as the
industrial revolution got underway. To this group can be added John Ramsay McCulloch who
became a leading political economist and statistician and Thomas Carlyle, an influential literary
figure and critic of what he termed 'the mechanical age' (in 1829). [South west Scotland also
produced the civil engineers Thomas Telford and John Loudon McAdam.]
And yet south west Scotland itself did not make the transition from the age of enlightenment to the
mechanical age. Yes, its medieval farmed landscape which had been created by Archibald the Grim
as the first Douglas lord of Galloway was rationalised, was surveyed and measured and
reconstructed as an improved landscape, but this newly ordered landscape was never disrupted by
the chaos of the industrial revolution.
Since my M.Phil. thesis was on the Galloway Levellers, I could only note these findings in
postscript. However, I have continued researching the background to the transition which occurred
as the eighteenth century gave way to the nineteenth. A stimulus for this research came from
Friederich Engels' 1850 critique of Thomas Carlyle.
To Thomas Carlyle belongs the credit of having taken the literary field against
the bourgeoisie at a time when its views, tastes and ideas held the whole of
official English literature totally in thrall, and in a manner which is at times even
revolutionary. For example, in his history of the French Revolution, in his
apology for Cromwell, in the pamphlet on Chartism and in Past and Present. But
in all these writings the critique of the present is closely bound up with a
strangely unhistorical apotheosis of the Middle Ages, which is a frequent
characteristic of other English revolutionaries too, for instance Cobbett and a
section of the Chartists. Whilst he at least admires in the past the classical
periods of a specific stage of society, the present drives him to despair and he
shudders at the thought of the future.
Engels' central argument was that 'though Carlyle is acquainted with German literature, he is not
acquainted with its necessary corollary, German philosophy, and all his views are in consequence
ingenuous, intuitive, more like Schelling than Hegel'. Lacking the key provided by Hegel, Engels
argued that '[Carlyle's] nationality leads him to empiricism; he is beset by a flagrant contradiction
which can only be resolved if he continues to develop his German-theoretical viewpoint to its final
conclusion, until it is totally reconciled with empiricism. To surmount the contradiction in which he
is working, Carlyle has only one more step to take'. This 'one more step' would have been for
Carlyle to adopt the materialist interpretation of Hegel as developed by 'young Hegelians' such as
Moses Hess, whose teachings had influenced Engels during his stay in Berlin in 1841- 42.
In 1844, Engels had been sent to manage a cotton mill owned by his family in Manchester. This
experience of the world's leading industrial city led him to conclude that the conditions of the
working classes in England were so dire that a French style Revolution was inevitable there. This
view in turn influenced the development of Karl Marx's thought which led to his critique of the
'science' of political economy. The theories of political economy Marx set out to critique had their
origins in the Scottish Enlightenment, in (as discussed above) Scotland's need to achieve equality
with England following the Union of 1707. Adam Smith is the best known of these early theorists,
but he was preceded by James Steuart. Steuart had been a Jacobite supporter in 1745/6 and then fled
into exile in France. His book Inquiry into the Principles of Political Economy was published in
1767. Georg Hegel was familiar with both Steuart's work and Smith's and their work influenced
Hegel's Philosophy of Right. [Note- this is a generalisation, but unfortunately direct evidence of
Hegel's reading/ interpretation of these texts has been lost.]
What neither Steuart nor Smith were able to take into account was the radical transformation of
economic practice brought about by the industrial revolution. Nor were they able to take into
account the political and social consequences of the French Revolution. Hegel was deeply
influenced by the effects of the French Revolution, but died in 1831 before the effects of the
industrial revolution had been fully felt in Germany.
In Manchester, the transition from Steuart and Smith's mercantile theories of political economy to
the industrial practice of political economy was made by manufacturers like John Kennedy, James
McConnel and the Murray brothers. J.R. McCulloch then took this practice as the basis for his
popularisations of political economy which Thomas Carlyle condensed into his observation that in
the mechanical age, all human relationships are based on 'the cash nexus'.
Before moving on to discuss the connection with thermodynamics, here is a quotation from
Immanuel Kant which was provoked by his reading of David Hume's observation that 'the self was
nothing more than a class of perceptions' – [from Robert Ware Hegel, Edinburgh 1999, p. 35]
I am conscious of myself. This thought contains a twofold ' I ', one as subject and
one as object. It is altogether beyond our powers to explain how it should be possible
that I, the thinking subject can be the object of perception to myself, able to
distinguish myself from myself. Nevertheless it is an undoubted fact. It indicates a
faculty that goes beyond all visual perception, and it is the foundation of an intellect.
It marks the complete separation from all beasts, because we have no reason to
attribute to them the faculty of saying 'I ' to themselves. And this opens the prospect
of an infinity of self-made conceptions. But we do not assume by this a double
personality : only the I who thinks and perceives is the person. The I as an object, the
I which is being perceived is simply a thing like all others which are outside me.
A tale of two revolutions.

The attempt to understand Engel's critique of Carlyle led me to Philosophy and Revolution-From
Kant to Marx by Stathis Kouvelakis [London, 2003]. The parallel attempt to understand the
industrial revolution led me to From Watt to Clausius -The rise of Thermodynamics in the Eraly
Industrial Age by Donald Cardwell [Iowa, 1989 edition]. Both books cover the same time period –
from 1760 to 1860 and the same countries - Britain, France and Germany, and yet the two texts
scarcely connect. Kouvelakis' main theme is that German philosophers and reformers wanted to
modernise a still fragmented Germany but hoped to do so without the need for a revolution. They
were at once inspired by and nervous of the French Revolution. Although Kouvelakis' does not do
so, parallels can be drawn with the relationship between Scotland and England in the early
eighteenth century. The German reforms wanted change to work from the top down, where an
enlightened ruling elite worked to remove the archaic and absolutist aspects of German society
without stirring up the un-enlightened masses. If this could be done, so they believed, a modernised
and reformed Germany would achieve equality with and even surpass, France.
This top-down approach to enlightened reform worked in Scotland, but was mainly complete by
1789. But even in Scotland, and even more so in England where groups like Birmingham's Lunar
Society were more isolated instances of enlightened thought, reaction to the 'excesses' of the French
Revolution closed down debate. In July 1791, Joseph Priestley's house in Birmingham was burnt
down by an anti-French mob. Priestley was a scientist and member of the Lunar Society who
supported the French Revolution. In Scotland, Robert Burns had to distance himself from his initial
enthusiasm for the French Revolution -as did his doctor, William Maxwell. Maxwell's support for
the revolution led him to France where he was one of the guards at the execution of Louis XVI.
In Germany, conservative reaction to the French Revolution and to Napoleon Bonaparte thwarted
the philosophical reformers ambitions. The spectre of revolution still continued to haunt Europe, but
with the failure of Chartism in Britain and the 1848 wave of revolutions in Europe, it became clear
to Karl Marx that it was the bourgeoisie's industrial revolution which was going to prevail. This
realisation led Marx to 'stand Hegel on his head' and interpret history from a materialist rather than
idealist perspective. However, when brought forward to the twentyfirst century, it is possible to
show that the materialist science of thermodynamics already contained within its nineteenth century
form the potential to stand Hegel back on his feet again – with the aid of Maxwell's demon.
The idea of a heat engine.

Cardwell's counter-text shows how the physical evolution of the steam engine in Britain stimulate
the creation of a new science- the science of thermodynamics. However, by adopting a historical
approach, Cardwell reveals that the process was more fraught and complex than more general
accounts of 'scientific progress' allow. The temptation here is to get stuck into a blow by blow
recounting of the book, since it brought back distant memories of studying physics at school and
classroom experiments which were designed to establish the principals of thermodynamic theory.
However, for the present purpose, it is one of Cardwell's minor themes which is of interest. This
theme is the shifting interplay between Britain, France and Germany in the revolutionary
development of thermodynamics which established a 'new cosmology- that of heat' and which
became ' the first branch of theoretical physics to be established independently of classical
mechanics'. British engineers and scientists continued to play their part, but French scientists had
the commanding role.
The Revolution seems to have had a double effect; it heightened the creative powers
of a people who were already among the most scientifically talented in the world
and, at the same time, it provided them with a new set of social institutions and
values - of which the Ecole Polytechnique was one outward symbol and
manifestation – which allowed them to bring their talents rapidly and efficiently on
important scientific problems...The result was that between 1790 and 1825 France
produced the brightest galaxy of scientific genius that the world has witnessed to
date. Revolutionary France also brought a new, professional touch to science...
[p.120].
To begin with, Germany made very little contribution to the scientific revolution through the
eighteenth century and the first two decades of the nineteenth. Cardwell suggests this was due to
Germany's general 'backwardness', but as Germany began to move towards unification in the mid-
nineteenth century the situation improved. German scientists no longer had to emigrate to France of
Britain, but stayed at home and built up Germany's commanding presence in the fields of science
and technology. The success of Rudolph Clausius (1822-1888), whose work marks the end of
Cardwell's study, illustrates this shift. It was Clausius who developed and extended the abstract
concept of a 'heat engine' formulated by Sadi Carnot (1796- 1832) which in turn led to the first and
second laws of thermodynamics.
The first law states that energy can change forms but can be neither created nor destroyed. So that
the energy for James Watt's steam engine came from coal which contained energy absorbed by trees
from sunlight millions of years ago... and the sun's energy ultimately has its origins in the big bang,
in the initial energy of the universe. Although only part of the energy stored in the coal was
converted into mechanical energy as the output of the steam engine, the rest of the energy was not
'destroyed', rather it was dissipated into the external environment. If the steam engine could be
placed in a sealed box and the energy within the box before and after a work cycle measured, there
would be no change.
The second law brings in the concept of 'entropy' (a word coined by Clausius). The idea of entropy
has its origin in earlier attempts to understand the workings of heat engines through analogies with
water powered machines. A water wheel will only turn where there is a height difference between
the water above and below the wheel. If there is no height difference, the wheel stops turning. With
a heat engine, its the flow of heat through the engine – from higher to lower temperature – which
turns the heat energy into mechanical energy. So long as new energy can be added to the system –
for example so long as the sun keeps driving the water cycle – the wheels can keep turning. But the
long term trend is towards a state of thermodynamic equilibrium – where (to use the steam engine
analogy) all the coal has been used up and so the ability to create a temperature difference is lost
and so the steam engine stops. [Note- this is too vague for a scientific account of entropy -but see
below.]
Maxwell's demon
In 1867, James Clerk Maxwell (1831- 1879) proposed the following thought experiment which
seemed to contradict the second law of thermodynamics.
... if we conceive of a being whose faculties are so sharpened that he can follow every
molecule in its course, such a being, whose attributes are as essentially finite as our own,
would be able to do what is impossible to us. For we have seen that molecules in a vessel
full of air at uniform temperature are moving with velocities by no means uniform, though
the mean velocity of any great number of them, arbitrarily selected, is almost exactly
uniform. Now let us suppose that such a vessel is divided into two portions, A and B, by a
division in which there is a small hole, and that a being, who can see the individual
molecules, opens and closes this hole, so as to allow only the swifter molecules to pass from
A to B, and only the slower molecules to pass from B to A. He will thus, without
expenditure of work, raise the temperature of B and lower that of A, in contradiction to the
second law of thermodynamics....
As Vlatko Vedral [ Decoding Reality -The Universe as Quantum Information, Oxford 2010, 69-74]
the contradiction created by Maxwell's demon was not finally exorcised until 1982 when Charles
Bennett provided a solution based on information theory. Information theory was developed by
Claude Shannon and other in the 1940s. Shannon found a relationship between uncertainty and the
transmission of information. If we imagine a message represented by the dots and dashes of Morse
code on a strip of paper, a statement of the already known or 'obvious' can be shortened – but a
more complex message, one with a higher degree of uncertainty cannot. A message with a higher
degree of uncertainty/ lower probability therefore has a higher information content. Shannon used
'entropy' to describe the uncertainty value in his theory. Since uncertainty can be equated with
'disorder' in physical systems, Shannon's and Clausius' entropy can then be equated.
With Maxwell's demon them what the demon is doing is restore 'order' to a disordered system by
separating the swifter from the slower molecules. To do so, the demon has to acquire information.
In 1929, nuclear physicist Leo Slizard (1898-1964) argued that the work done by the demon in
acquiring the information would be enough to resolve the contradiction with the second law of
thermodynamics. Charles Bennett showed ( by imagining the demon as a mechanical device like a
mini-computer) that it would be the erasing or delection of the information gained which was
critical.
This, and other examples, is used by Vedral to support his suggestion that 'information is physical'
and his conclusion that the universe, as an information system, can be created out of nothing. To
support this claim [Vedral 2010, 198-9] he uses a mathematical theory developed by John von
Neumann (1903-1957).
A fascinating method of creating natural numbers out of empty sets was developed
by von Neumann in the 1920s. Here is what he imagined. A set is a collection of of
things (just like the Universe). An empty set is a collection that contains nothing at
all.- you can think of this as zero information. Von Neumann proposed that all
numbers could be bootstrapped out of the empty set by the operation of the mind...
The mind observes the empty set. It is not difficult to imagine this empty set also
containing an empty set within itself. But hold on, now we have an empty set
containing an empty set, so does this mean that the empty set has an element (albeit
the element is an empty set)? Yes, the mind has thus generated the number one by
producing the set containing the empty set. If we then consider that the empty set
contained within the empty set yet contains its won empty set, then the mind has thus
generated the number two out of emptiness... in this way the mind created all natural
numbers, but literally out of nothing...
Although written in a very accessible way, the information content of Vedral's text is very high. It
therefore resists compression and summation. The text itself requires to be read. What can be done
is to use Vedral's discussion of von Neumann's make a jump back to Georg Hegel.
Reconfiguring Hegel
Through his influence on Karl Marx, Georg Hegel's later and more accessible work, in particular his
Philosophy of Right. In contrast the deep structure of Hegel's Science of Logic has not and later
philosophers, including Bertrand Russell, have dismissed it as confused and confusing. Robert
Pippin and Robert Hanna (both in The Hegel Myths and Legends, editor Jon Stewart, 1996),
Stephen Houlgate ( The Opening of Hegel's Logic: From Being to Infinity, 2006) and Robert Ware
(Hegel -The Logic of Self-Consciousness and the legacy of Subjective Freedom, 1999) have all
attempted to overcome the dismissive view of Hegel's Logic. From Ware in particular, illuminating
connections can be made with Vedral's quantum information description of reality.
Both consciousness and the universe as a whole can be modelled as classes that
contain themselves as members. On the one hand, if consciousness is defined as the
class of objects of which I am conscious, then, since I am conscious of my
consciousness, this class contains itself as a member. On the other hand, logicians
commonly identify the universal class, which demonstrably contains itself as a
member, with the universe considered as a whole. The application of the same model
to both self-consciousness and the physical universe permits a clarification of Hegel's
ontology in so far as it supports his identification of substance with self-conscious
subjectivity. [Ware, p. 4]
Vedral quotes physicist David Deutsch (but does not give a reference) on the problems posed by a
'theory of everything' or an 'all-explanatory physical principle P approachable by the methods of

science'. If we cannot find P, then that would imply that there are parts of the natural world
inaccessible to science. This would run counter to rationalism and the view of physics as the
'universal science'. However if P is within physics it would be 'forever insoluble', given that ' no
principle (or law) can explain its own origin or form'. [Vedral, p.9] Vedral's argument is that if
information rather than matter or energy is the building block on which everything is constructed,
the logical problem posed by Deutsch's P no longer arises. The concept of an ultimate explanatory
law becomes less important than the process or method whereby useful information arises, 'firmly
placing the concept of an ultimate physical principle only in our created reality rather than as a
necessary construct for the Universe itself.' [Vedral, p. 10].
To extend Ware's reconfiguration of Hegel to the point where it is possible to show (or at least
strongly suggest) that Vedral's information theory of reality existed in Hegel's system of logic would
be difficult. It would require expert knowledge of both Hegel's work and quantum information
theory. Lacking such expert knowledge, I will not attempt to do so.
The age of reason and the industrial revolution.
One of the 'Galloway group' who moved to north-west England was Peter Ewart (1769 -1842). The
following extracts from his entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography indicates the
range of his interests.
After early education at a local school, Ewart at the age of fifteen attended lectures at
Edinburgh University, where his cousin John Robison (1739–1805) was professor of
natural philosophy. (It was this connection that later commended him to James Watt.)
At about the same time he was apprenticed to John Rennie (1761–1821), then a
millwright in Haddingtonshire. In 1784 Rennie, when commissioned by Watt to help
with the erection of the Albion Mills, Blackfriars, took Ewart with him to London.
Four years later Ewart was at work on a water-wheel for Matthew Boulton's rolling
mill in Birmingham. At this time markets for Watt's rotative steam engine were
opening up in the growing cotton and woollen textile industries; and in 1789 Boulton
and Watt sent Ewart to Manchester to erect a Watt engine for Peter Drinkwater. In
1790 Ewart became Boulton and Watt's northern area representative. This brought
him into contact with other leaders of the industrial revolution, such as George Lee
(who married his youngest sister, Mary Ewart), Benjamin Gott, Samuel Oldknow,
and William Strutt...
He had joined the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society in 1798; in 1812 he
became, with John Dalton, a vice-president of the society. His wide experience of
steam and water power on the one hand and his knowledge of mathematics and
natural philosophy on the other made him unusually well qualified to pronounce on
the vexed questions of power, force, and work, still veiled in confusion. An attack,
probably by John Playfair, in the Edinburgh Review (12, 1808, 120–130) on W. H.
Wollaston's Bakerian lecture, and on John Smeaton's experiments between 1759 and
1782, was the occasion for the longest (153 pages) and most important of the four
papers Ewart published, ‘On the measure of moving force’ (1813). This was a
sustained plea that British mathematicians and natural philosophers should take
account of the concept of ‘living force’ or vis viva and the related measure of work
(force times distance), advocated strongly by Smeaton, supported by Wollaston, and
used by most engineers.
The received doctrine that momentum (mv) is the true measure of the force was
supported by the fact that momentum is conserved when inelastic bodies collide,
while vis viva (mv2) is apparently not conserved. Ewart, following Smeaton, argued
that the apparent loss of vis viva was accounted for by the ‘change of figure’ of the
colliding bodies. And, having countered the theoretical objections to vis viva, he
pointed out that a wide range of manufacturing processes depend on ‘change of
figure’ and that the losses entailed can be accurately calculated. The received
doctrine cannot account for ‘change of figure’. An insight, in the paper, was his
assertion, contrary to the Edinburgh critic, that to a given quantity of heat, used in a
steam engine, there must correspond a fixed amount of work. Ewart knew, of course,
that in all practical engines the full amount of work could never be realized. He did
not, however, recognize that heat could be converted into work.
Ewart's involvement with the Albion Flour Mills in London gives a connection to William Blake,
since it was the blackened shell of the Albion Mills which (probably) inspired Blake's famous
reference to 'dark, Satanic mills' in his introduction to Milton (now better known as the hymn
Jerusalem.) The transformation brought about by Peter Ewart and his fellow engineers and
industrialists is vividly captured in these lines from Chapter 3 of Blake's poem Jerusalem.
Then left the Sons of Urizen the plow & harrow, the loom
The hammer & the chisel, & the rule & compasses; from London fleeing
They forg'd the sword on Cheviot, the chariot of war & the battle-ax,
The trumpet fitted to mortal battle, & the flute of summer in Annandale
And all the Arts of Life, they chang'd into the Arts of Death in Albion.
The hour-glass contemn'd because its simple workmanship,
Was like the workmanship of the plowman, & the water wheel,
That raises water into cisterns broken & burn'd with fire:
Because its workmanship, was like the workmanship of the shepherd,
And in their stead, intricate wheels invented, wheel without wheel:
To perplex youth in their outgoings, & to bind to labours in Albion
Of day & night the myriads of eternity that they may grind
And polish brass & iron hour after hour laborious task;
Kept ignorant of its use, that they might spend the days of wisdom
In sorrowful drudgery, to obtain a scanty pittance of bread:
In ignorance to view a small portion & think that All.
And call it Demonstration: blind to all the simple rules of life.
Yet in Ewart's native Galloway, the simple workmanship of the water wheel was not displaced by
the intricacies of the steam engine. Why was this?
The simplest answer is the absence of coal. For all the efforts of the enlightened landowners, even
the wealthiest ( with fortunes made through the tobacco and sugar trade) Galloway never passed
from the ordered patterns of age of reason to the dynamic chaos of Manchester's industrial
revolution. With access to coal brought right into the heart of the city by a network of canals,
Manchester was able to break through the limits imposed by reliance on 'renewable' sources of
energy. The canal system also connected Manchester with the rapidly growing port of Liverpool
through which raw cotton could be imported and finished cotton exported. Unlike linen and wool,
the production of cotton could be rapidly expanded through the expansion of slave-worked
plantations in north America.
While it was the energy stored in coal which helped the industrial revolution break free from past
physical constraints on economic expansion, without a parallel social revolution the process of
technological (and scientific) advance would have been much slower. The social revolution was
capitalism. The expansion of capital was as essential as the expansion of steam if the revolution was
to succeed. We know the outcome – capitalism prevailed, its growth fuelled by coal and then oil.
But at the same time – the late eighteenth/ early nineteenth centuries – as coal-fired capitalism was
taking off in Manchester, the consequences of France's revolution were being felt. If we go back to
Kouvelakis' text, for the philosophers who experienced it, it was the French revolution which swept
away feudalism and superstition and made the modern world. Only after the fog of war had lifted
from the battlefield of Waterloo in 1815 did it become apparent that the 'English' had had their own
revolution. By 1827, parts of French industry were described as having undergone a 'Grande
Revolution Industrielle' and in 1837 French economist Jerome Blanqui said that the 'revolution
industrielle' had taken possession of England.
From 1830 onwards, steam operated railways began to be developed in Europe and the USA. In
Europe, these early railways were often financed by British investors, built with British materials
and constructed by British labour. In 1824, John Kennedy (of Manchester and Knocknalling)
argued against permitting the export of cotton manufacturing machinery since this would allow
other countries to catch up with Britain and develop their own manufacturing industries more
rapidly than if they first had to build up their own machine making skills. [On the exportation of
machinery, a letter addressed to the Right Honourable E.G. Stanley MP, London 1824.] Kennedy
estimated that Britain had a fifty year lead over other countries in the development of industrial
technology. When the Great Exhibition was held in London in 1851, Britain still held this lead but
by 1870 Germany and the USA were the rising industrial nations.
Heat engines and climate change
Every so often in Cardwell's history of thermodynamics, there are flashes of the future. Thus
between the time of Scheele [Carl Wilhelm Scheele 1742-1786] and that of Fourier
[Jean Baptiste Fourier 1768 -1830] the study of heat transfer and in particular of
radiant heat had a number of important general consequences. In the first place, take
in conjunction with the progress made by the undulatory theory of light, it provided
increasingly weighty reasons for doubting the material or caloric theory of heat. In
the second place, thanks to the work of Rumford, Leslie, Wells and Fourier, it led to a
great extension of knowledge about the role of heat in geophysical, meteorological

and even cosmological phenomena. Indeed a new cosmology – that of heat- began to
emerge and through the efforts of Joseph Fourier it reached the stage of advanced
mathematical theory: the first branch of theoretical physics to be established
independently of classical mechanics.[p.119]
From the perspective of 2011, Cardwell's words from 1971 on the role of heat in geophysical and
meteorological (if not cosmological) phenomena seem to look forward to the problem of climate
change driven by global warming. We now know that the work done by the heat engines, and
which so stimulated the immense advances in economic growth and scientific knowledge which
have taken place since the mid-eighteenth century, has also released enough 'fossilised' carbon
dioxide to warm the planet. As a consequence, the relatively stable climate which has persisted for
the past 10 000 or so years is changing. Since the Neolithic revolution – the invention of
agriculture- relied on climate stability this would have profound implications for our ability to know
and understand the world we live in. Human beings can survive changes in climate. Humanity has
survived in colder, wetter and drier climate conditions. However, the people who were able to
survive these conditions were small groups of relatively mobile gatherers and hunters. Those groups
which survived had intimate and powerful understandings of their environments and were able to
pass those understandings on through successive generations. What such societies could not do was
accumulate and store surpluses of food, of goods, of knowledge. Amongst the earliest written
records known are those from Uruk in Sumeria (now Iraq). These were records of the surplus food
stored in the city's temples about 5000 years ago. With ability to write, history and the ability to
accumulate information began.
A return to the Mesolithic form of production and of human culture is not yet inevitable, but to halt
the increase in carbon dioxide will mean giving up our heat engines. The difficulty is that so much
of our current ways of life depend on them. Is a sustainable society, one based on the exploitation of
only renewable resources, in any way possible? And even if it is, will there be a corresponding loss
of 'knowledge'? Would we be thrust back into the medieval period?
My study of the Galloway Levellers ended with an image of the 'Green House' – a wood and glass
building with a living turf roof which is the headquarters of the Natural Power company. The
building is close to one of the dams on the eighty year old Galloway Hydro-electric system .
Slightly further away, the turbines of the Windy Standard wind-farm have been in operation for
since 1996. Less than a mile away is Knocknalling farm where John Kennedy was born in 1769.
The present Knocknalling House was built for Kennedy from the profits he made as a cotton
spinning mill owner in Manchester. Twelve miles away, at Dalmellington on the north side of the
Southern Upland Fault there are open-cast coal mines served by a railway first opened in 1856 to
serve the Dalmellinton Iron Company's furnaces and coal mines. The Damellington coal field was
the destination of the Glenkenns Canal in 1803. Although authorised, it was never built. Even if it
had been, it is doubtful that Galloway would have become industrialised since the process of
agricultural improvement was too well established.
My speculation was that in Galloway, a shift towards a sustainable economy would not return the
region to its medieval condition, but would rather more clearly reveal its late eighteenth century
'structure'. That the region was transformed during the 'age of reason' by a series of improvements
which had their origin in the Scottish Enlightenment. Without easy access to coal, however, the
process of change halted and became 'frozen' on the edge of the industrial revolution.
This led on to my interest in Hegel. His great system was developed in a Germany which was not
yet industrialised. At the same time, the revolutionary impulses of the Enlightenment (both French
and Scottish) influenced Hegel's work. What I was (and still am) working towards is a counter-
argument to that which claims that without our heat-engines we would be reduced to a state of
ignorance and 'barbarism' – analogous to the Dark Age which followed the fall of the western
Roman Empire in the early fifth century. My very large if is IF it can be shown that Hegel, rather
than generating a pseudo-philosophical, pseudo-scientific mystical fog of speculative non-sense
really did (as Robert Ware and others have argued) make a major advance in our knowledge of
reality, and IF that advance can be mapped onto Vlatko Vedral's quantum information based theory
of reality, THEN a world without heat engines would still have the capacity to generate non-trivial
new knowledge.
Immediately there are problems. Without heat engines, without the burning of millions of tons of
coal and barrels of oil, would we now have the knowledge which (may) confirms Hegel's insights?
Would we have, for example, the photomultiplier used to detect individual photons in Vedral's
example of the 'causeless click' from which he argues as follows, based on attempting to detect a
photon that has passed through a bean-splitter. [p.203-4]
We can ask if the particle is the cause for the detector to click. The answer is no. The
reason is that in quantum physics, as we have argued, particles exist and don't exist at
the same time. Here I don't just mean that they exist in different places, I mean that
even in one place a particle can exist and not exist simultaneously. This too is a
direct consequence of quantum indeterminacy. What would this mean in the beam-
splitter example discussed earlier? It means that a photon simultaneously enters and
does not enter it and this implies that the only time it will be detected at the output is
when it exists. Whether the detector clicks or not is a genuinely random event that
cannot be predicted by any means, in the same way that we cannot predict the
photon's reflection in the beam splitter. This implies that we should not say that an
existing particle caused a click just like we cannot say that the photon's reflection
caused a click (since we know that it also passes through). The click has no cuase at
all and therefore we have no underlying particles.
And since there are no underlying particles in reality, there are no things in the
Universe that are made up of particles existing without the intricate procedures to
detect them. Detection events are genuinely random and the emerging reality is seen
in the correlations, expressed as laws of physics, between the events, which are bits
of information...
Reality is made up of quantum bits, each arising from a causeless click. A click
entirely without cause has the novel property that it introduces a discontinuity in
time. Once an event is recorded, it is solidified for ever in the Universe. It becomes
an element of what we call the past. However before the event occurs, we have an
uncertainty as to when and where it will happen. All possibilities are then present at
the same time and the game is completely open. The occurrence of the event then
belongs to something we call the future. Fundamental randomness at the core of
reality therefore allows us to have a distinction between the solidified, unchanging
past and a fluid, dynamic future...
An amazing issue to note is this. The above meditation in realising emptiness is a
very similar exercise to von Neumann's number creation out of empty sets; it just
goes in the exact opposite direction. Von Neumann went from an empty set into an
infinite set of real numbers and here we started with macroscopic objects and
deconstructed them to find that actually there is nothing behind them, they are based
on randomness, no prior information.
This is the darkness of reality! Anything that exists in this Universe, anything to
which you can attribute any kind of reality, only exists by virtue of the mutual
information it shares with other objects in the Universe. Underneath this, nothing
else exists, nothing else has any underlying reality and hence there is no infinite
regression. It just has to be this way, as otherwise we are asking a finite Universe to
contain an infinite amount of information – and this is clearly not possible!
Most concisely, Vedral states 'Information can be created from emptiness'... the universe can then
be constructed from information...and then (as above) the universe can be deconstructed back to
nothingness. This does seem to be similar to Hegel's equation of Being with Nothing in the first part
of his Science of Logic.
Being, pure being, without any further determination. In its indeterminate immediacy
it is equal only to itself. It is also not unequal relatively to an other; it has no diversity
within itself nor any with a reference outwards. It would not be held fast in its purity
if it contained any determination or content which could be distinguished in it or by
which it could be distinguished from an other. It is pure indeterminateness and
emptiness. There is nothing to be intuited in it, if one can speak here of intuiting; or,
it is only this pure intuiting itself. Just as little is anything to be thought in it, or it is
equally only this empty thinking. Being, the indeterminate immediate, is in fact
nothing, and neither more nor less than nothing.
Nothing, pure nothing: it is simply equality with itself, complete emptiness, absence
of all determination and content — undifferentiatedness in itself. In so far as intuiting
or thinking can be mentioned here, it counts as a distinction whether something or
nothing is intuited or thought. To intuit or think nothing has, therefore, a meaning;
both are distinguished and thus nothing is (exists) in our intuiting or thinking; or
rather it is empty intuition and thought itself, and the same empty intuition or thought
as pure being. Nothing is, therefore, the same determination, or rather absence of
determination, and thus altogether the same as, pure being
Physical reality and social reality

As I am writing this [late November 2010] there are fears that the EU attempt to manage Ireland's
banking crisis may fail and that the 'contagion' might spread and even lead to the failure of the Euro
as a currency. This makes it difficult not to jump straight to Karl Marx's critique of Hegel. Marx
argued that Hegel needed to be 'stood on his head'. As Marx put it ' If I say : Roman law and
German law are both systems of law, then that is obvious. But if I say Law, this abstraction is
realized in Roman law and in German law, these concrete systems of law, then the relationship is
mystical.'[Introduction to Karl Marx Early Writings Penguin edition, p. 40]
Is this relationship 'mystical'? If I say that James Watt's low- pressure steam engine and Richard
Trevithick's high-pressure steam engine are both heat engines, is it 'mystical' to say that Rudolf
Diesel's engine was a realisation of the idealised heat engine? Diesel worked from the abstract to
the concrete, producing a paper on the Theory and Construction of a Rational Heat-engine to
Replace the Steam Engine and Combustion Engines Known Today before he built his first working
engine. Vedral deals with the problem by suggesting the existence of two 'arrows of knowledge'.
The first arrow of knowledge clearly acts like a Maxwell's demon. It constantly
combats the [thermodynamic] arrow of time and tirelessly compresses disorder into
something more meaningful. It connects seemingly random and causeless events
into strings of mutually inter-related facts. The second arrow of knowledge ,
however, acts in the opposite direction of increasing disorder. By changing our view
of reality it instructs us that there are more actions we can take within the new reality
than we could with the previous, more limited, view. [p.213]
So the first arrow moves from the abstract to the concrete, from the ideal to the actual. The second
moves from the concrete to the abstract, from the actual to the ideal. This image of an endless cycle
of contraction and expansion suggests the idealised heat engine and also points to the tension
between Hegel and Marx. Hegel acted like a Maxwell demon, compressing /contracting the chaos
of history into an ordered sequence. Marx then took this newly ordered system and expanded it to
reveal the possibilities -the actions we can take- contained within this new reality. Then in 1989
came Francis Fukuyama's essay 'The End of History?' which claimed that with the fall of the Berlin
Wall and the collapse of communism in eastern Europe, Hegel had triumphed over Marx... Except
that in The Hegel Myths and Legends, Francis Fukuyama's essay is the subject of three debunkings
in which Fukuyama is criticised for misunderstanding Hegel's notion of 'the end of history'. What
Hegel meant was that with the French Revolution, rationality finally achieved the self-
consciousness it had been struggling to achieve through centuries of history. With this realisation of
rational self- consciousness, humanity would no longer be the unconscious object of historical
conflicts, but could proceed knowingly into the future. To return to an earlier theme, Germany, for
example, could therefore achieve the benefits of enlightened progress without having to pass
through its own revolution – in a similar manner to the way Scotland's union with England
stimulated the Scottish Enlightenment without Scotland's bourgeoisie themselves having to
overthrow feudalism. [This is the theme of Neil Davidson's Discovering the Scottish Revolution
1692- 1746, London 2003]
Yet despite Hegel's position as the leading German philosopher, even before his death in 1831, the
forces of reaction rather than progress had begun to prevail in Prussia and the other German states.
By 1843, when the young Karl Marx was writing his minutely detailed Critique of Hegel's Doctrine
of the State, the reactionary forces were much stronger and Hegel's optimism seemed dangerously
naïve. Furthermore, as Marx was soon to learn from Friedrich Engels, the forces unleashed by
Britain's industrial revolution were no less potent than those unleashed in France in 1789. [See
Marx's Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts written between April and August 1844]. Hegel
himself had recognised this new dimension in his last published work – a critical analysis of the
'English' Reform Bill of 1831.
Is the intertwining of physical reality – heat engines and social reality - capitalism comig to and
end? At some point it must. If so, is there a return to Hegel? I am reflecting here on the little part of
forgotten history that emerged from my Galloway Levellers research, where the water wheels of
Galloway's cotton mills had all stopped turning by 1840 (one big wheel in Gatehouse of Fleet was
restored 20 years ago – but although the wheel keeps turning, it does no useful work) – in part
because John Kennedy, Peter Ewart and the others had harnessed the power of heat engines. Was
there a similar divergence with Hegel's work? That the moment of apparent/ potential order was
denied/ delayed by a volcanic eruption of heat from blazing fires of coal? The transfer of heat from
physical reality to social reality triggering a global 'catastrophe' (as in an irreversible change)
propagated through 'an immense accumulation of commodities' as Marx described the capitalist
mode of production in the opening lines of Capital? [Guy Debord turned this into 'an immesne
accumulation of spectacles' in the opening lines of The Society of the Spectacle.]
Towards a conclusion
Here is a quote from Robert Ware -
I ordinarily conceive of myself as a finite and limited entity because I regularly

reflect upon myself as a particular member of the class of objects of which I am
conscious. Yet so far as self- consciousness is conceived on the model of self-
containment, I am more than this particular object upon which I reflect. I am also that
which does the reflecting; which can never be an object of reflection; and which is
entirely without determinate attributes. That which does the reflecting from the
higher level is subjectivity or Hegelian spirit, and it is this same undifferentiated
subjectivity that experiences the rich diversity of the world from each of our
mutually exclusive perspectives. In other words it is the same undifferentiated
subjectivity which is differentiated in all of us in so far as we are considered as
determinate objects at the lower level. When we look into one another's eyes it is the
same subjectivity that is viewing itself from each of these differentiated, opposing
and mutually exclusive perspectives. Our opposing perspectives may be conceived as
reciprocal, and mutually exclusive actualisations of the same indeterminate
universality. [p.66-7]
In the conclusion to his book, Vlatko Vedral wonders if, in the process of searching [through
science] for better and better understandings of the Universe, we might be creating new information
about the Universe? New information which then, through 'conjectures and refutations' is fed back
into the basic laws of Nature. But 'could it be that there is no other information in the Universe
than that generated by us as we create our own reality?'
The problem here is Vedral's 'we'. Who are the 'we' who might be creating our own reality? Does he
mean a collection of individuals – the six billion or so human beings on this planet? Or the rather
smaller number of physicists and related scientists and mathematicians (past and present) who are
actively engaged in discovering / creating the laws of Nature? Or is the 'we' better understood as
Ware's 'undifferentiated subjectivity' or' indeterminate universality'?
If information can generate the fabric of physical reality, as Vedral argues, then his 'we' is Ware and
Hegel's 'undifferentiated subjectivity', is 'indeterminate universality' rather than our everyday and
individual 'differentiated subjectivity'. Yet at the same time, 'we' as distinct and distinguishable
individuals create our social reality, a social reality which takes the form of houses and cities, heat
engines and computers and all the other products/ commodities within and through which we exist
as differentiated individuals. In turn, as we grow up and are socialised into this reality, it creates our
sense of self as a differentiated individual alienated from an undifferentiated subjectivity. To the
extent that social reality is the product of the progressive division of labour (and now includes the
division of mental labour) entropy as ignorance/ lack of knowledge has increased. This possibility
was partially recognised by Adam Smith [Wealth of Nations Volume II page 365]
In the progress of the division of labour, the employment of the far greater part of those who
live by labour, that is, of the great body of the people, comes to be confined to a few very
simple operations; frequently to one or two. But the understandings of the greater part of
men are necessarily formed by their ordinary employments. The man whose whole life is
spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects too are, perhaps, always
the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding or to exercise
his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He
naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and
ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become.
Since Smith's time, the division of labour has been multiplied and extended to absorb virtually
every aspect of social reality. This fragmentation of reality is one reason why it is so difficult to
grasp Hegel's 'logic', why it already appeared to Marx writing in the 1840s as 'mystical' . But if
information is physical (which it has to be to avoid the paradox of Maxwell's demon) and if Hegel's
logic is a form of information theory, then what was mysticism becomes materialism. And then
what?
The information acquired by Maxwell's demon as it distinguishes high velocity from low velocity
molecules of air must eventually be erased. The erasure adds disorder to the system, thus increasing
its entropy and so balances out the decrease in disorder achieved by the demon. In a 'perfect'
system, as with the cycle of an idealised/ abstracted heat engine, the entropy is conserved. The
system goes through its cycle and returns exactly to its starting place. With no increase in entropy
there is no 'arrow of time' to distinguish one start/ end of a cycle from any other start/ end of a
cycle. The process is timeless and eternal and thus unreal – a form of perpetual motion which is also
perpetually motionless. But as soon as any work is done, any knowledge gained is applied, entropy
increases and time begins. At the cosmological level, time starts with the big bang. From the second
law of thermodynamics, time will end when the universe which began with the big bang reaches a
state of maximum entropy. As individual human beings, the cosmological time scale of billions of
years is reduced to the span of the few decades between conception and death. As living beings,
throughout the duration of our lives we work as Maxwell demons, reversing the increase of entropy
until death undoes us.
But what of human societies? For most of the thousands of years of their (our) existence homo
sapiens lived as small groups of gatherers and hunters leaving few traces of their presence. Without
writing, their knowledge of the world could not accumulate and so was recycled from generation to
generation as what social anthropologists call 'myth' (which includes the real with the fantastic).
Only with the Neolithic revolution does the information contained in myth begin to take solid –
monumental- form. With the transition to the bronze age history begins through the invention of
writing. With the first historic cultures, the attempt to fix and hold information begins in earnest,
does the solidification and accumulation of memory begin. Fixed through fire on clay tablets or
carved on rock, resistance to entropy as information loss becomes humanity's challenge. As
information is processed and compressed through the preservation/ conservation of writing, so law
codes, religious scriptures and philosophical enquiries begin to shape human societies in their own
image. Thus even the collapse into chaos of the Roman's empire is a recoverable catastrophe. The
information content of the empire, of the Graeco-Roman Maxwell demon, may have been
fragmented and scattered, but the entropy resistance of writing conserved its essential coherence.
The re-assembled fragments inspired first a renaissance and then, in the eighteenth century, a break-
through to the modern world.
The physical signs of this process have been preserved in the ice-sheets of Greenland. Atmospheric
traces of Roman lead-smelting are preserved there, followed by a blank until the mid-eighteenth
century revival of large scale industrial processes.
http://www.iceandclimate.nbi.ku.dk/research/past_atmos/ice_core_impurities/human_induced_imp/
As discussed above, the eighteenth century industrial revolution was part of a connected series of
scientific, philosophical, economic and social revolutions. In an indirect version of the Maxwell's
demon paradox, the subsequent increase in processed information (knowledge/ economic
development) has led to the release of enough stored carbon dioxide to begin a process of global
climate change through global warming. If unchecked, the consequences are likely to collapse
human societies back to survival/ subsistence level. At the same time, such is the dependence of the
current global economy/ society on the use of carbon dioxide emitting energy sources that it is
feared that any attempt to reduce carbon dioxide emissions will lead to a collapse back to survival/
subsistence level anyway.
Is our problem that of Maxwell's demon at a global level? If information is physical, is the growth
of human knowledge constrained by the second law of thermodynamics? Is it possible to conserve
our collectively accumulated knowledge within a society based on sustainable energy use?
Perhaps the question is one of rationality. I am haunted by the spectre of Hegel's Logic and the way
it seemed to appear just as the world out of which it arose was about to be transformed irrevocably
by the massive release of energy stored in coal and oil. One effect of the transformation was to
create a body of knowledge which retrospectively validates Hegel. But the same transformation also
buried Hegel beneath a mountain of commodities and behind a wall of irrationality. The peak of
this energy surge has passed/ is passing and the reality of a low energy future is emerging - slowly
and painfully. It would have been easier if the first steps to the transition had been made 35 years
ago when the potential of renewable energy was proposed as an alternative to dependence on fossil
fuels and nuclear energy. Or if the shift from rail to road transport had not been pursued so
vigorously in the 1960s.
Optimism versus pessimism. But where does realism lie? The real is the rational according to
Hegel, such that the real is the actualisation of the rational. I have suggested that the
capitalist/industrial revolution was a form of irrationalism created by the sudden input of (fossil)
energy into human society. The surge of irrationality is now fading as the cheap energy which drove
the process is being used up. Unfortunately, the surge of irrationality has had a warming impact on
global climate. The relatively stable climate which allowed the Neolithic revolution is likely to be
replaced by a more unstable climate. With an unstable climate, the ability to accumulate surpluses
of food and knowledge will be diminished. In which case 'history' would end and gathering and
hunting would be the future for the surviving remnants of humanity.
Against this pessimistic scenario, there is the possibility of a rational transition to a more
sustainable ordering of social reality, one which recognises the limits of physical reality. But how?
For all that I have managed to find some correlations between Hegel's Logic and information
theory, the actualisation of the rational in reality still seems 'mystical' rather than 'material'. It is as
if we are caught in a double alienation. As individuals we are alienated by the sheer complexity of
quantum information theory from our apparent role as 'creators' of physical reality. At the same time
we are alienated by the sheer complexity of the intertwining of politics and economics from our
apparent role as 'creators' of social reality. Thus we are reduced to the role of passive spectators or
observers of ourselves and the world. In this state of alienation, we consume both ourselves and the
world, never recognising our role as creators.
...'truth includes not only the result but the path to it.' But this is a path strewn with
obstacles, which consciousness, if it is to progress, must learn to recognize as
obstacles of its own devising. 'The reform of consciousness consists only in making
the world aware of its own consciousness, in awakening out of its dream about itself,
in explaining to it the meaning of its own actions.' Dream precedes action, for … the
dream is a dream of the world itself, participating, with all its ambiguities and
confusions, in the movement of emergent consciousness that it merely anticipates:
'Hence, our motto must be: reform of consciousness not through dogmas, but by
analysing the mystical consciousness that is unintelligible to itself, whether it
manifests itself in a religious or a political form. It will then become evident that the
world has long dreamed of possessing something of which it only has to be
conscious in order to possess it in reality'. [Kouvelakis p. 282]
The quotations embedded in the above are from a letter written by Marx to Arnold Ruge in 1843. In
1967, Guy Debord recycled them as 'The world already possess the dream of a time, of which it
must now possess the consciousness so as to really live it.' [Society of the Spectacle Thesis 167]
The dream of realising rationality in waking consciousness has its counterpart in lucid dreaming,
where the aim is to realise waking consciousness within dreaming consciousness. The problem
experienced (at least by myself) is that the dream state tends to reject the attempt. The attempt to
achieve consciousness within a dream usually leads to the dream ending through waking up. Our
problem, as James Joyce put it is that 'History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake'. So
long as the actualisation of rationality remains a dream, the world as 'history' continues as a
nightmare from which we cannot awaken. If what Robert Ware describes as 'undifferentiated
subjectivity' is Hegel's Absolute Spirit (or consciousness) and is the 'we' of Vlatko Vedral's science
of quantum information theory, then so long as that 'mystical consciousness' as Marx described it
remains unintelligible to itself (to ourselves) we will continue to experience history as a nightmare
from which we are unable to awaken. In the long term, the second law of thermodynamics will
prevail and entropy as disorder will prevail. But in the short term, which is the reality of the present,
it is by evoking Maxwell's demon we can analyse the unintelligible and by so doing create order out
of disorder and thus realise the rational in the world.
Alistair Livingston 8 December 2010.

Evoking Maxwell's Demon

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Evoking Maxwell's demon 1