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a language, a notation, evolved, which is being used here, alas, in a some-
what loose fashion, and I would like to recall for you the occasion on which
these notions arose. After I have made these brief contacts with history just
to see the perspectives, I will then try to show that the notions of disorder,
order, and organization are conceptually linked to a general notion of com-
putation. This will give me a platform, first to talk in quantitative terms
about order and complexity, hence of those processes by which order, or
complexity, is increased or decreased; but secondly—and this is the essen-
tial justification for my tying these notions to computation—to show that
these measures are fully dependent upon the chosen framework (which
turns out to be the language) in which these computations are carried out.
In other words, the amount of order, or of complexity, is unavoidably tied
to the language in which we talk about these phenomena. That is, in chang-
ing language, different orders and complexities are created, and this is the
main point I would like to make.
Since a free choice is given to us which language we may use, we have
moved this point into a cognitive domain, and I will reflect upon two types
of cognition which I already touched upon in my introductory statement;
namely, the problem of whether the states that we call “disorder and order”
are states of affairs that are discovered or invented. When I take the posi-
tion of
invention
, it becomes clear that the one who invents is of course
responsible for his or her invention. At the moment when the notion of
responsibility arises, we have the notion of
ethics
. I will then develop the
fundamental notion of an ethics that refutes ordering principles attempting
to organize the other by the injunction, “Thou shalt,” and replace it by the
organizational principle, that is, organizing oneself with the injunction “I
shall.” With this note I have given you a brief outline of my talk. Now, ladies
and gentlemen, I can begin with my presentation!
First, I would like you to come with me to the year 1850. This is approx-
imately the time when the First Law of Thermodynamics was well estab-
lished, one understood the principle of conservation of energy, and the
Second Law of Thermodynamics was just in the making. What was observed
and what was intriguing people very much at that time was an interesting
experiment. I ask you to look with me please at the following fascinating
state of affairs. Consider two containers, or reservoirs, of the same size. One
is hot, and the other one is cool. Now you take these containers, put them
together, fuse them, so to speak, and watch what happens. Spontaneously,
without our doing anything to them, the cold container will become
warmer, and the warmer will become colder. Now, you may say, “O.K., so
what?” But, ladies and gentlemen, if you say, “so what?” to anything, you
will not see anything.
The engineers (and as Mr. Prigogine has so properly said, thermody-
namics was an engineering science), who were working with steam engines,
heat engines, etc., were wondering about the efficiency of these machines.
They knew very well that if one has a hot and a cold container, one can put
between these two vessels a heat engine that will do some work for us,
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