Ergo

The Ergo

Celebrating René Descartes, the first modern philosopher, and his famous phrase Ego cogito, ergo sum, we call our model for an objective value, independent of humanity, the Ergo.

Our model for human knowledge we call the Sum. Our two-stage model for free will we call the Cogito. And our model for the mind we call the Ego.

Energy with Negative Entropy is perhaps the most positive thing in the universe, so we decided it needed a positive name.

We took the international unit of energy, the erg (derived from the Greek word for work, ergon), and added a zero to it, inspired by the fundamental energy state E₀ and the thermodynamic "free energy," often designated G₀, for J. Willard Gibbs. G₀ is the free energy at constant temperature and pressure, suitable for calculations in the Earth's environment.

Gibbs free energy is proportional to a system's thermodynamic information (negative entropy).

G = U + PV - TS,

where U is the internal heat content, PV is the work, T is the temperature, and S is the entropy.

Erg₀ led us to a play on words with Descartes' Ergo.

But the powerful adjective Ergodic puts us squarely in conflict with an existing term in statistical physics. We feel it's not the first time that a word takes on an entirely new meaning in a closely related field. See our justification.

In information philosophy and physics, ergodic processes are those that resist the terrible and universal Second Law of Thermodynamics, which commands the increase of chaos and entropy (disorder). Ergodic processes create information structures.

Without violating that inviolable second law overall, ergodic processes reduce the entropy locally, bringing pockets of cosmos and negative entropy (order and information-rich structures).

We call all this cosmic order the Ergo. It is the ultimate sine qua non.

We can also call the more common natural processes that increase the entropy entropic.

The theomorphic variation Ergod looked to be useful philosophically.

Norbert Wiener famously viewed entropy as "the devil incarnate."

We sympathize with Wiener and see ergodic and entropic processes as a universal objective basis for Good and Evil.

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