Participant: L. Elio Porto
Format: Presentation and Conversation
Themes: paradigm, praxis

This article examines the emergence of human language and meaning systems through ecological processes and material events in the physical universe. Specifically, it 1) expands Michel Serres’ notion about thermodynamics and the origin of language; 2) connects Schneider and Kay’s ideas—regarding reduction of solar-energetic gradients by terrestrial ecosystems—to aspects of human meaning systems; and 3) builds upon the work of the Panarchists to include human meaning systems and language.

Life is contingent upon disequilibrium. Terrestrial ecosystems acquire and degrade solar energy or its derivatives thereby reducing the thermal gradient impressed on Earth by the Sun. Kay (1984) and Schneider (1988) call this “the thermodynamic imperative of the restated second law for open systems.” Warm-blooded organisms (homoiotherms) must maintain a state of thermal disequilibrium (greater heat) with respect to their environments. Michel Serres (1977) posited that this thermal difference may be the origin of language (in an irreducible utterance such as “keep me warm”). I propose:

1. that the homoiotherm’s requisite thermal disequilibrium produces a “local energetic order” characterized by the emergence of binary opposition as an ineluctable idea;
2. humans efficiently use this highly stable primordial idea (of duality/binarism) as an instrument to produce entropy—i.e., to identify, acquire, and degrade energy within its ecosystems; and
3. human language, and ultimately human consciousness itself, arises in origin from thermal disequilibrium.

Binarism is therefore a true gradient dissipator which has remained fundamental to and consistent with human evolution across various operations and stages, including non-dialectical, self-organizing, and autopoietic ones, since “the irreversibility demanded by [the] second law bespeaks a degree of causal openness” (Ulanowicz 2009). Thus, this binary process includes development of human meaning systems and production of languages, thoughts, ideologies, identities, and so forth. In producing such complex operations, the binarism of the Local Order yields to the cycles, spirals, and roundedness of the Medial Order—whereby the emphasis shifts from creation of entropy to maintenance of exergy. The Local Order also yields to the unknown and unknowable nature of the Permeative Order when the individual or collective organic system needs to recognize its fundamental interconnectedness.