Jun 29 2016
Lecture | Rod Swenson on The Law of Maximum Entropy Production, Autocatakinetics and the Evolutionary Epistemology of Planetary Evolution from Cells to Global Economies, AI and the Explosion of Social Media with introduction by Cheyney Thompson
Wed | 7pm
Rod Swenson is most known for his identification and elaboration of the Law of Maximum Entropy Production (“LMEP” or the “4th Law”) more than 25 years ago. Along with his analysis of autocatakinetic (canonical self-organizing) systems, with LMEP Swenson turned the prevailing view of the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics (the Entropy Law) as a law of disorder on its head. He showed why instead “the world is in the order production business,” accounting for the ubiquitous and opportunistic transformation from disordered to more ordered or highly ordered states that characterizes evolution on Earth from the origin of life to the rise of nation states and global economies.
On the occasion of Less Light Warm Words, please join us as Rod Swenson lectures on: an explication of LMEP, how it came to be understood and how it provided the missing piece to the puzzle of opportunistic evolutionary ordering; autocatakinesis (the canonical model of self-organizing flow structures); the origin of intelligent or epistemic systems and their minimal ontology from first principles; how these principles underlie AI, the rapid proliferation of social media and some of the evolutionary consequences.
The Fourth Law of Thermodynamics: The Law of Maximum Entropy Production (LMEP), An Interview with Rod Swenson
Autocatakinetics and the Law of Maximum Entropy Production: A Principled Foundation Towards the Study of Human Ecology
Thermodynamic Reasons for Perception-Action Cycles
Spontaneous Order, Autocatakinetic Closure, and the Development of Space-TimePlease RSVP to rsvp@swissinstitute.net.Rod Swenson is a CESPA Fellow at the University of Connecticut. His work has received hundreds of citations in scientific journals and books from physics to biology as well as psychology, where with colleagues at the University of Connecticut these principles were shown to account for the epistemic dimension of the world or the origin and evolution of “intelligent” forms and their artificial counterparts.
Cheyney Thompson was born in Baton Rouge, LA and lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. He has a BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Recent shows include and Materials and Money and Crisis, MUMOK Vienna, From Minimalism to Algorithm, The Kitchen, New York, and Une Histoire, Centre Pompidou, Paris. The 2012 solo exhibition, Cheyney Thompson: metric, pedestal, landlord, cabengo, recit, curated by João Ribas at MIT Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts was accompanied by a book with contributions by João Ribas, Yve-Alain Bois, Ann Lauterbach, and Simon Baier. Thompson has held teaching positions at Bard MFA, Cooper Union, and Columbia University since 2005.