Experience, Entropy and the Ephemeral - Part I
I. The Ground of Experience
We find ourselves always already in experience. This is not an ontological claim but a recognition of our starting point. Any attempt to ground experience in something more fundamental—consciousness, matter, information—already imposes construction on what is given. Even to speak of “what is given” suggests a giver and receiver, a division we cannot justifiably make at this level. In a way, the rawness of this “pure” experience is ineffable much in the same way God is ineffable in Platonic models.
Within this ground of experience, resistance manifests. Not as something external pushing back against our will or understanding, but as an intrinsic feature of experience itself—emergent. Every attempt to fully systematize, comprehend, or capture experience encounters this resistance. It appears as the incompressibility of the present moment, the inability to fully articulate a sensation, the gap between map and territory.
This resistance bears the character of entropy—a tendency toward dissolution, an arrow of time, an inevitable loss of distinction and order. But we must be careful here. To call it entropy is already to construct, to impose a scientific framework on that which precedes science. Yet this construction proves useful, illuminating aspects of resistance that resonate across domains of experience.
II. Temporal Subjugation and the Production of Anxiety
Our most fundamental subjugation is to time. Unlike space, which we can traverse freely in any direction, time holds us in its irreversible flow. This temporal subjugation is not merely a limitation but a constitutive feature of experience that generates both anxiety and productivity. Each moment slips away as it arrives, creating a perpetual loss that we can neither prevent nor fully accept.
This temporal character of experience creates an existential tension, perhaps the existential tension. We strive for permanence while being composed of impermanence. We seek to create lasting meaning while being swept along in time’s current. This tension manifests as a fundamental anxiety—not a psychological state that some experience and others don’t, but a basic feature of temporal existence that underpins all experience.
This anxiety proves productive. The very impossibility of escaping time’s flow drives us to create, to build, to systematize. We construct languages to capture fleeting thoughts, build monuments to preserve passing moments, develop sciences to predict future states, create art to crystallize ephemeral beauty. All human production can be understood as arising from this temporal anxiety—attempts to achieve some permanence in the face of inevitable dissolution.
III. The Nature of Resistance
The resistance we encounter in experience takes many forms, but always bears certain characteristics. It manifests as the excess that escapes our categories, the remainder that resists our equations, the ineffable quality that slips through our words. This resistance isn’t arbitrary but patterned—some constructions fail immediately, others work remarkably well, most occupy a middle ground of partial success.
This patterned resistance suggests structure without implying substance. Like the wind made visible only through the movement of leaves, resistance appears through the failure of our attempts at complete capture. This is not a negative theology, defining reality only by what it is not. Rather, it is a recognition that resistance itself is productive—generating both the possibility and limitations of our constructions.
The entropy-like character of this resistance connects to our temporal subjugation. Time’s arrow creates an inevitable gradient toward dissolution, yet this very gradient enables the emergence of structure. Like a river whose flow both erodes and creates, temporal entropy both destroys and enables construction. This dual character—destructive and productive—proves essential to understanding the nature of emergence and the possibility of meaning.