As Lacan said, there is no way to tell the whole truth, words fail, and truth can only be half-said. In physics this is called a macrostate: A scientist who measures certain variables of a system such as pressure, volume, temperature, etc. is only able to depict an incomplete picture of that system. The complete picture of the system, called the microstate, that would include the instantaneous positions and velocities of all the particles that make up the system, is an in-itself that is inaccessible to the scientist.

Science had turbulent affairs with this microstate. First it was entirely rejected because it testified to the impotence of scientific knowledge; then it was accepted as something that scientists can know in principle but not in practice; then it became something that can be computationally simulated by engineers although quite inexactly due to chaotic butterfly effects; finally, in an astonishing reflexive move, the scientists chose to attribute the knowledge about the microstate to the universe itself: Mortal humans will never know the microstate, but that’s no problem, because the universe already knows about it. This universal complete information is currently believed to inhere in the strange omniscient surface-supposed-to-know that is theorized in the Holographic Principle [1].

When the microstate was first theorized as the prospect of an inaccessible albeit complete description of a system, this microstate had to have a relation to the macrostate that the scientists already knew about. This relation was established by Boltzmann’s entropy formula:

S = k log W

Here S is the entropy that the formula defines, k is a universal constant, and W is the crucial quantity called “multiplicity” that relates the microstate to the macrostate. As such, W here stands for the scientist’s lack of knowledge about the universe [2].

W is statically and statistically defined as the number of microstates that share the same macrostate. This means: From the perspective of that macrostate, no particular one among those W microstates is distinguishable from the rest. The multiplicity W is indistinguishable due to the observer’s knowledge limitations.

But the supposed “indistinction” of W only pertains to the observer’s officially unperturbed state of mind, since W also testifies to the observer’s scientific impotence and renders him/her surprised and anxious because of his/her utter inability to discern the elements of that multiplicity. On the other side of the official “indistinction”, there is an unofficial and uncanny “disparity” that deeply penetrates, divides and bars the observer’s subjectivity. Of course, science always “sutures” this subjectivity [3].

In dynamic and dynamistical terms, the scientific observer possesses:

1) A currently incomplete picture of the system.

2) A certain premonition about the amount of disparity that (s)he will need to confront if the current incomplete description is elaborated and advanced further.

If the multiplicity W is greater, then the system’s description will branch and ramify more and it will quickly generate a great complexity as it progresses. It will be more traumatic and more challenging to symbolize. This is what psychoanalysis would call a symptomatic complex.

Entropy as the logarithm of W registers the “current dynamic rate of branching in the symptomatic complex” as opposed to the exact number W of the microstate combinations that statistically support the macrostate.

The difference of status between S and W results in a strange epistemological conundrum: The scientist is able to use S in his/her equations without knowing the exact value of W. But in order to legitimize the scientific use of S, the scientist has to presuppose the existence of W within the universe in some exact form. And in modern science, W takes the form of the omniscient surface-supposed-to-know, the “holographic screen”. This is a Hegelian move that reflects the disparity between the subject and the substance onto the subjectivity of the substance itself. This strange entity can be compared alternatively to lamella, to a body without organs, to an organ without bodies, or simply to the truth at the horizon of our perspective opened up by our lack of knowledge [4]. The complete description of the microstate does not and cannot really exist in the universe, it’s just a necessary presupposition that renders the universe scientifically approachable.

(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] See “Double time theory and the surface-supposed-to-know”

[2] The letter W is fortuitous here, because it also stands for the combinatorial unworld: “Fifth dit-mansion: w”, “The combinatorial ground of spatiality”

[3] See “Dynamistics and Dynamistical Significance”

[4] See “Unknowing opens the field of truth in the horizon of knowledge”