When Sigmund Freud said “we cannot wait until the definitive theory of drives is handed to us on a plate by some other science” [1] was he expressing excitement and impatience about such a prospect? Or was he just being realistic and lowering his expectations? In any case, there is no need to abandon this hope for a scientific theory of drives.

In fact, a recent theory called “dissipative adaptation” by the physicist Jeremy England sounds extremely Freudian [2]. Just like Freud, England uses the term “drive” but in a different sense. In nonequilibrium statistical physics, a drive is an external source of energy that powers a physical system. It’s a dynamical factor that often has a cyclicity which mustn’t be confused with an equilibrium.

Examples: Sunlight drives the life on Earth. Gravity drives the river system. This noise is driving me crazy. Significantly, these are also called hysteretic nonequilibrium systems because they enact a history [3]: They undergo a stochastic evolution in which they accumulate information about the external drives to which they have been subject. Due to this history, enaction is not the same as realization.

The hysteretic system gets (in)formed via the driven emergence of dynamical structures which we might as well call symptom-formations. In psychoanalysis, a drive is a constant force internal to the psyche. Notice that the external drive of physics and the internal drive of psychoanalysis echo one another both in meaning and in reality.

At the heart of England’s theory is an equation called the Crooks fluctuation theorem (CFT). According to CFT, a physical system is exponentially more likely to enact transformations that produce greater entropy. Here’s what CFT looks like:

On the left is the probability of enacting a transformation x(t) divided by the probability of enacting the reverse transformation. On the right is the exponential of the entropy produced by that transformation. This equation says: The greater the entropy produced by a transformation, the greater (exponentially) the odds of enacting that transformation. The exponential ratio can render the transformation practically irreversible.

The fact that CFT favors greater entropy production is closely related to the second law of thermodynamics which requires that entropy always increases. But when England deploys CFT in the context of external drives, the demand to increase entropy production is mediated by the requirement that the system acquire the ability to absorb more energy (“tune into” the drive) and dissipate more heat.

England’s result is significantly different from the second law: While the second law directly favors the increase of disorder itself, England’s theory favors the organization of orderly systems that in turn produce the great disorder. While second law evokes brute forces wreaking havoc, England’s CFT evokes smarter and more efficient (and moreover emergent) ways to do the same.

According to the second law, nature is supposed to have a tendency to fall to ruin, which sounds somewhat tragic although obvious. England’s CFT subverts this commonplace tragic wisdom by introducing a comical twist: Actually, the natural tendency favors the emergence of exceptionally organized systems which are in a relentless competition to cause the greatest devastation in the world! As you might have noticed, this sounds a lot like the Freudian death drive.

We might understand this twist by distinguishing entropy-in-itself from entropy-for-itself. According to the second law, the ultimate bias of nature is to increase entropy-for-itself (explicit disorder). This natural bias is due to the sheer number and prevalence of disordered states in comparison to the remarkable rarity of the ordered states.

However, we are only able to observe the macrostates of systems, and the combinations of microstates that underlie such macrostates are informationally inaccessible from our perspective. This combinatorial unworld is analogous to the unconscious in psychoanalysis [4]. These combinations of microstates carry a latent potential to produce entropy in the future; let’s call this entropy-in-itself. This inaccessible potential ‘perverts’ (in the precise Freudian sense) the natural bias to ultimately produce more entropy: Nature ends up not favoring the direct increase of disorder, but generating populations of orderly systems that will be able to indirectly produce the greatest total disorder.

“Dissipative adaptation” arrives at a certain duality in the ways of adaptation: When there are external drives like sunlight, gravity, noise, etc. affecting the stochastic evolution of the hysteretic nonequilibrium system, nature favors systems that either (1) protect themselves by becoming insensitive against the external drive or (2) develop ways to “reliably” absorb work from the external drive and produce entropy as a result of this work, often in a cyclical manner. Here “reliable” means that fluctutations in absorption and dissipation are avoided by nature, the absorption-dissipation process must demonstrate a certain constancy.

The first kind of adaptation (insensitivization) brings to mind Freud’s theory of the inorganic cortical layer that protects the living being against external stimuli and differentiates into the organs of perception (see [1]). The second kind of adaptation (“reliable” absorption-dissipation) brings to mind the constancy of pressure in the Freudian drive, and the cyclical movement of the Lacanian drive which “makes oneself worked on” (Lacan: “making oneself seen”, “making oneself heard”, Seminar 11, p. 195) [5]. Moreover, for reliable work absorption, the system must “tune into” the specific pattern (called its “fingerprint”) of the external drive, just like a wine glass that can oscillate in specific frequencies. This feature makes “dissipative adaptation” sound a lot like Dynamistical Echology [6].

(Turkish)

Işık Barış Fidaner is a computer scientist with a PhD from Boğaziçi University, İstanbul. Admin of Yersiz Şeyler, Editor of Žižekian Analysis, Curator of Görce Writings. Twitter: @BarisFidaner

Notes:

[1] Sigmund Freud (1920) Beyond the Pleasure Principle.

[2] See “Why trees don’t ungrow” Jeremy England; see also his book Every Life Is On Fire: How Thermodynamics Explains the Origins of Living Things (2020); see also “Statistical Physics of Adaptation” Nikolai Perunov, Robert Marsland, Jeremy England

[3] Hysteresis and hysteria come from the same Greek root which means both “afterward” and “womb” thereby linking Freud’s Nachträglichkeit to femininity. This brings the notion that your hard disk is pregnant with your data.

[4] See “Spatial and Combinatorial”, “Lacan’s Torus is the 3D Spatial Approximation of the Combinatorial Unworld”

[5] Not to mention what Lacan said about knowledge-at-work and entropy: “Knowledge-at-work is an Effort with Real Engagement”, “Entropy: Deleuze’s Symptom, Lacan’s Key”, “Always Afterwards: Entropy and Sacrifice”; also recall how much “discharge” (or release, Abfuhr) mattered to Freud.

[6] See “Dynamistics and Dynamistical Significance”