Abstract: The Task of The Scientist

Full Paper: https://open.substack.com/pub/bergsonsghost/p/the-task-of-the-scientist

This is the abstract to the full paper found HERE.

This paper makes three claims.

First, properly understood, Claude Shannon’s information theory marks a paradigm shift as radical as the Copernican revolution—a shift we might call the entropic turn. By extending entropy from physical systems to any domain where uncertainty can be measured, including human language, Shannon collapses the old divide between world and mind. Here nature and culture, matter and meaning, are not separate realms but parallel manifestations of a universal entropic process. Entropy here is not a tally of substance but a measure of transformation, and shapes even the symbol-making thermodynamic eddies we call human beings.

Second, this entropic turn fundamentally reshapes our understanding of representation. Rather than seeing representation originating in symbolic reference or correspondence, Shannon’s framework positions representation as the compression of a high entropy Universe into lower entropy patterns that support prediction and action by an agent. Representation emerges with primitive life through basic mechanisms like chemotaxis, gradually evolving to form complex low-entropy internal models translating high-entropy sensory flux. Symbolic representation, far from being foundational, functions as a late evolving stage in the evolution of representation: a reshaping and further compression of embodied, predictive patterns into forms that are shared and portable across different bodies. The entropic turn thus integrates the dynamics of perception and symbolic language within a single informational framework defined by entropic pruning. Within this framework, the dynamics shaping language and those shaping matter are not merely analogous but fundamentally the same.

Third, these claims, taken together, reframe what it is we think we are doing when we make meaning, whether in the sciences or the humanities. These domains, often treated as distinct in method or aim, can be seen instead as parallel entropic responses: each a mode of compression that translates complexity into form under conditions of uncertainty. Science seeks structural and predictive clarity; the humanities foreground interpretation, ambiguity, and affect—but both arise from embodied systems adapting to a universe in constant flux.

As a guide into these questions, I turn to Walter Benjamin’s theory of translation—not in its conventional application to human languages, but as a metaphorical and methodological framework for engaging with nature itself as a kind of text. For Benjamin, translation is not the reproduction of meaning but its transformation across difference, always pointing toward a horizon of pure language that no single articulation can fully achieve. In this spirit, I treat scientific modeling and hermeneutic interpretation as parallel forms of entropic translation. Each attempts, in its own register, to render the world intelligible by compressing complexity into form. My hope is that this framing opens a more generative dialogue between science and hermeneutics—not by collapsing their distinctions, but by revealing a shared structure of sense-making rooted in uncertainty, transformation, and the pursuit of meaning under constraint.