Your Flow of Flows, or, How die Wüste wächst ¹

Dissipation of dissipations, spake the Preacher, dissipation of dissipations, everything is dissipation. ²

it's all just one entropy generator after another ³

In his second book Peter Brannen aims “to provide a mechanistic account, starting at the beginning of Earth history, of how things got to be the way they are today, at this unprecedentedly strange and out-of-control, if infinitesimal, moment in Earth history.” ⁴   As to the way things are today, Brannen observes that “we're in deep shit.” ⁵  

As a first pass at the implications of Brannen's observation for fundamental ontology, let's recall Peirce's schema of abductive inference:

“The surprising fact, C, is observed; But if A were true, C would be a matter of course, Hence, there is reason to suspect that A is true.” ⁶

Strangely, uncannily, Dasein—sense-making—now finds itself in deep shit ( surprise!). But if sense-making ex-sists in service of shit-making (sensu lato), then the predicament would be a matter of course.  Hence there is reason to suspect that sense-making is (ultimately) for shit-making.  Again, shit in the wide sense of crap, trash, garbage, entropy.

Peirce was quick to add that abductive insight is a very weak and fallible form of inference.  As Lonergan cautions, “insights are a dime a dozen, so critical reasonableness doubts, checks, makes sure.” ⁷   Lucky for the inference at issue there is a large literature documenting human society to be  a  robust generator of entropy, cosmic waste.  

Too bad the inference has only feeble explanatory power.  Entropy anyhow  increases, is always getting generated.  ‘It's the law’ that ∆ S ≥ 0, and to a very good nth  approximation ‘=’ does not happen.  So Brannen recounts cosmic history this way: “A long time ago, here, there, and everywhere else, everything was all together and unreasonably hot. [the past-hypothesis]  One day, a very, very long time from now, everything will be very, very far apart [due to the Hubble flow ⁸ ], and incredibly cold, and nothing will ever happen again.”  In the interim everything is “endlessly dissipating [generating entropy].  In fact, it all exists in the service of getting us as quickly and efficiently as possible to that uniform, universal [dissipation] at the end of time [the Big Λήθη].” ⁹

‘Quickly’ points to a stronger explanatory power.  Brannen notes that “if there is a route to dissipating more free energy—if there is a path to generating more entropy—life will take it.”¹⁰  What comes later in Brannen's account warrants our supplementing ‘more’ with ‘faster.’ Brannen interviewed Axel Kleidon (of the MEP research program ¹¹ ) and cites two of Kleidon's papers in the bibliography.  Kleidon says in another: “The proposed principle of maximum entropy production (MEP), based on statistical mechanics and information theory, states that thermodynamic processes far from thermodynamic equilibrium will adapt to steady states at which they dissipate energy and produce entropy at the maximum possible rate [my emphasis].”¹²   Brannen quotes Michael Russell's remark that the biosphere as a whole can be thought of as “a vast industry of cascading dissipating- accelerating engines [my emphasis].” ¹³   I.e., the engines of life increase dS/dt over what it would be in their absence. ¹⁴   So our inference, changed by this new light, becomes now ‘Sense-making ex-sists in service of increasing the (local) rate of entropy production.’

Brannen recognizes of course that CO₂ is not per se  entropy.  In our case, carbon dioxide is a byproduct of both of two metabolic (entropy-generating) pathways: degrading the free energy in food, ¹⁵  and degrading the free energy in fossil carbon—coal, gas, oil.  We inherited the first pathway from its inventors, ‘the Old Ones;’ the second, the faster, we invented ourselves.  With the result that modern human society “now dissipates almost 600 exajoules of energy per year.” ¹⁶  

If we convert 600 exajoules per year to watts and divide by 288 Kelvin, the rate of civilization-wide entropy production comes out to around 6.6 × 10 10  W/K.  In 2014 Bradley Layton used the value “our 500+ exajoule-per-year technological diet” to calculate the rate of entropy production of industrial society to be 5.53 × 10 10  W/K.  Layton then went boldly on to estimate the volumetric rate of entropy production of ‘the everything’ and concluded that “on a volumetric basis, humans entropicize their environment at a rate 1.80 · 10 23  times greater than the ‘background’ entropy generation rate of the universe.” ¹⁷  

Modern industrial society generates CO2  at—frequent phrase of Brannen's—an almost geologically unprecedented rate.  Brannen's historical account of the carbon cycle cogently establishes the rate of our contribution of carbon dioxide to the cycle as heretofore seldom, maybe never, seen, and “wildly destabilizing” to the point of catastrophe.  Because, “indefinitely burning carbon [at the current level] to subsidize our lifestyles will, without overstatement, cause the apocalypse.” ¹⁸   He means the sudden mass destruction of lives, human and other.       

Brannen retells an exchange he had with Michael Russell:

“We have this weird low-entropy situation,” I fumbled in my interview with Russell, launching into what I thought would sound like an irredeemably stoned musing, “where you have lots of reduced organic carbon buried underground and a highly oxidizing atmosphere above, and our industrial civilization between them is obviously very complex and unlikely, and is dissipating this planetary gradient in what seems to me to be sort of analogous to some of the stuff you're talking about [the thermodynamics of the emergence of life ¹⁹ ]. Is that way off base?”

“I think that's exactly right,” he said before leaving me with one last cryptic pensée.  One that sat uneasily with me.  I leave it to the reader to judge whether it is insightful and profound, meaningless, or even repellent and ahistorical.

“Capitalism is not an ideology, it's a discovery,” he said. ²⁰                    

The notion of capitalism as a recently invented entropy-accelerator²¹  accords with the proposition that “if there is a route to dissipating more free energy—if there is a path to generating more entropy —life will take it.”   Kapitalismus— jene dunkle, treibende, unersättlich sich selbst begehrende Macht .²²   Actually Nietzsche wrote Leben ; but consumer-capitalism is, if anything, a ‘complicated form of life’ in Wittgenstein's sense.   Give Dasein capitalism and it will soon take everything as commodifyable.

So Brannen appropriately characterizes it as a metabolism.  CO2, he writes, “is our signature product.  From a planetary perspective, human society is now, above all else, a conduit for moving carbon in the crust into the atmosphere.  CO 2  is what we make.  It's the exhausted end product of an industrial respiration that is busy metabolizing all of Earth history in order to transform as much of the planet's surface as possible into more human civilization.” ²³

From the perspective of fundamental ontology, Welt is what we make. ²⁴   “The stone is weltlos, the animal is weltarm, human being is weltbildend.” ²⁵   We transform as much of the planet as possible as fast as we can into more Welt.  Sub specie  pantadynamics, entropy is the final product of world-building. CO 2 is, again, a by-product of sense→world→entropy.  The faster the Verwandlung the higher the rate of CO2 production.

What's the actual problem with that?  CO2  retards the radiation of entropy (heat) into space.  

“CO2  makes the planet warmer, so put enough into the air and much of the planet will become lethally hot to animals.  And warmer water holds less oxygen, so if you dramatically warm the oceans, they'll hold less oxygen as well.  This problem is compounded by warmer, wilder weather that wears down and erodes the continents, overloading the oceans with mineral nutrients washing in from land.  Those nutrients then fuel explosive algae blooms that, when they decay, are consumed by aerobic microbes, which uses up even more oxygen—essentially turning much of the ocean into a stagnant pond. . . . And once the ocean starts losing its oxygen, even more sinister kill mechanisms come to the fore.  Around the world, blooms of ancient bacteria begin to flourish.  Bacteria of the type that thrives in suffocating oceans start to suffuse the seas with toxic hydrogen sulfide.  . . .  excess CO 2 also reacts with seawater to  make it more acidic as well—threatening the creatures that precipitate their shells out of the ocean, like corals and shellfish.  And so global warming, ocean deoxygenation, and ocean acidification—three apocalyptic horsemen only beginning to stir today—were in full gallop during the majority of the worst events that ever happened to life on this planet [mass extinctions].  And all this planetary chaos was driven by an overdose of CO 2.” ²⁶

‘Overdose’ as in ‘too much too fast.’  “It's all about the rate,” says Brannen; “the best estimate is that we're emitting carbon perhaps ten times faster than the Siberian volcanoes that brought about the worst mass extinction ever [the end-Permian].” ²⁷   “It's not just the amount of CO2  that matters, it's also the flux . . . the rate at which humans are currently injecting CO 2  into the oceans and atmosphere today far surpasses the planet's ability to keep pace.  We are currently at the initial phases of a system failure.” ²⁸  

Wo aber Gefahr ist, wächst Das Rettende auch.   Brannen's candidate for The Saving Power is human culture;  which he thinks might, through a Grand Wandel , convert society to a different metabolism:

“After eons freeloading off the energy captured by photosynthesis and burning it back to CO 2 , we need to instead capture our own.  We need to become photosynthetic [and geothermaldynamic, tidaldynamic, fissiondynamic, etc.].”  “To avoid the dire climate trajectories that lie ahead, we have to do the equivalent of switching out the metabolism that has been powering all aerobic life for over a billion years for an equally powerful—no, more  powerful—one, in a matter of decades, and at a scale unprecedented in Earth history, much less human history.” ²⁹    

Du mußt deine Technik ändern .  Which Brannen considers to be feasible, or at least not foreclosed; for he disagrees with those who see human dynamics as deterministic, like the dynamics of bacterial colonies or hurricanes.

“I think what distinguishes us as a species—from bacteria, other animals, and especially hurricanes—is our ability to learn from each other and the world around us, transcend the limits of our biology and our environment by improvising, and organize ourselves and our societies in novel and adaptive ways.  After all, it wasn't thick hides or fangs that kept us alive across an ice age that saw the global temperature swing 6℃ or more over tens of millennia, but our culture.” ³⁰

So Brannen concludes we can and should try to switch out our technological metabolism. “I know that maintaining our current path will lead toward certain climate catastrophe, so whatever the odds of our success to alter this trajectory, there is only one way to find out, and we might as well give it our best shot. That's about where I've landed.” ³¹

Caelum non animum mutant.   Cleaning the sky by changing out the current technological metabolism for a de-carbonized, more powerful one cannot alter our ontological metabolism, sense-making.  A more powerful technological metabolism will only provide us a faster route to dissipating more free energy, an expedited path to generating more entropy, an expanded power to transform more of the planet into more Welt.    

“From the start [zunächst],” Heidegger says, “human existence [ das Dasein ] is held [hält sich ] in an encountering concern for what can be produced, used, and procured — in the broadest sense, for what it can be concerned with. . . . Human existence's expecting [ Gewärtigen] comes from its making-present [Gegenwärtigen ]: its ordering-up, making-available, taking-possession-of, holding-on-to.” ³²    Ereignis drives produktive Aneignung .  

Thomas Sheehan repeatedly emphasizes Heidegger's point that we are obligate sense-makers and thereby sense-making is conserved; dieses Seiende ist das, was immer ist, wie es ist: ³³

“What we do through all our waking hours (perhaps even during REM sleep) is make sense of stuff, whether of people, things, ideas, or experiences—whatever we happen to encounter.  We make sense of things even when we get it wrong, or go insane, or babble incoherently on our death beds. . . . Heidegger argues we cannot not make sense of things because sense-making—the ‘disclosing’ of things, whether correctly or not—is a fundamental element of our nature. . . . The core of Heidegger's work is about how and why we cannot not make sense of things.” ³⁴

In heat-engine terms the meaning-process ³⁵  can be conceptualized as three moments.  The source of free energy (first moment) is the disclosure of things as things.  In Heidegger's ontological story:  

“With the existence of human beings there occurs an irruption [Einbruch] into the totality of beings [ in das Ganze des Seienden ], so that now the being [entity] in itself first [ jetzt erst] becomes manifest, i.e., as being [ das Seiende an ihm selbst, d.h. als Seiendes offenbar wird ], in varying degrees, according to various levels of clarity, in various degrees of certainty.” ³⁶

Heidegger labels the second moment, the converter, ‘the as-structure,’ die Als-Struktur. ‘To project’ is entwerfen etwas als/auf etwas, to take something as something ³⁷  for the sake of weltbildend.   E.g., “producing [das Herstellen] itself is in each instance a using of  something for something [ein Verwenden von etwas für etwas].” ³⁸

Third moment, nature— das Unverständliche schlechthin , die entweltlichte Welt³⁹ —as the sink, the dump, for the entropy generated by world-forming.  In the Madman's vision: Irren wir nicht wie durch ein unendliches Nichts? Haucht uns nicht der leere Raum an? Ist es nicht kälter geworden? ⁴⁰   Via the meaning-process we do our part to entropicize  the local environment, ‘to grow the wasteland,’ and thereby to make das unendliches Nichts cool a wee faster than it would without us.  

Within a few centuries, Brannen believes, “we will be operating under a new regime.”  I understand him to mean, in the first instance, a regime of de-carbonized technology.  Yet he also hopes for another sort of regime change, “the hope that we will be wiser tomorrow;” that we may learn to imitate life's “enduring systems on the Earth, rather than mimic the one-off supereruption of a large igneous province.” ⁴¹   “Perhaps,” he muses,

“the global economy can ‘grow’ forever without the material or energy throughput growing at all. Although it's not clear what the economy even is in that case, if its growth has no relation to the physical, material world.  Perhaps people can hand things back and forth to each other forever, and the economy will grow in perpetuity.  At the very least, this seems strange.” ⁴²      

Strange insofar as ‘that's not who we are.’  Again in Sheehan's explication of Heidegger:

“We are opened  in ourselves and ever open ing up  all that we meet by rendering it meaningfully present: available, appreciable, enjoyable, usable, transformable, destroyable, affirmable, deniable, loveable, hateable — and a host of other daseinsmäßig  ‘-ables’. . . . The very possibility and necessity  [my emphasis] of humanizing the world (yes, humanizing  it: bringing it into the world of ex-sistence) is ‘given’ before we can do anything about it and thus before we can enact all the ‘-ables’ that make up our lives.” ⁴³  

This passage calls to mind the old teaching (a variety of ontological narcissism) that our office as human being carries authority to transform as much of the planet as possible into more human civilization, to humanize the Earth. ⁴⁴   Aristotle observes that we make use (χρώμεθα) of everything extant (πάντων ὑπαρχόντων) as if it's there for our sake (ὡς ἡμῶν ἕνεκα). ⁴⁵   And in the Politics he reasons that φύσις did indeed make the animals for the use of human beings. ⁴⁶  Spinoza extends the point when he avers that whatever is not human, quicquid extra homines, is takeable quocunque modo ad nostrum usum adaptare . ⁴⁷  

Our manic use-making is, one more time, ontologically obligate: “Dasein is in itself excessive, i.e., defined by a primary insatiability for beings.” ⁴⁸   So by the light of Heidegger's work this ancient doctrine manifests an inchoate appreciation of sense-making as nature's   locally pre-eminent entropy-accelerator.  And in that light continued expansion of Erschlossenheit implies ever more rapid deepening of Gescheißenheit.

DCW  3/23/2026

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