TOTAL CHAOS

Week 7

 

“ORDERED CHAOS” - does this sound familiar?

I will share an interesting quote from a collection of essays by Alan Watts as my answer to this.  Bare with me here, it’s really worth reading, and there is an intuitive connection to be made which really does answer the question. :

“…So this is why the Chinese recognize both sides of human nature, and a Confucian would say he trusts human passions more than he trusts human virtues: righteousness, goodness, principles, and all that highfalutin abstraction.  Let’s get down to earth, let’s come off it.  And this, then is why there is a kind of man in whom trust is put, because he recognizes the kind of nature that human nature is.  If you are like the Christians who don’t trust human nature –who say, “It’s fallen, it’s evil, it’s perverse” –that puts you in a very funny position.  If you say, “Human nature is not to be trusted,” then you can’t even trust the fact that you don’t trust it! And do you see where you’ll end up?

            Now, it’s true that human nature is not always trustworthy, but you must proceed that it is trustworthy most of the time, or at least 51% of the time.  Because if you don’t, what’s your alternative?  You have to have a police state, and everybody has to be watched and controlled.  But then who’s going to watch the police?  So, you end up the way they did in China just before 250 B.C. when there was the Ch’in Dynasty that lasted fifteen years.  The Emperor decided that everything would be completely controlled in order to make his dynasty last for a thousand years.  In the process, he made a mess.  So the Han Dynasty, which lasted from 250B.C. to 250 A.D., came into being, and the first thing they did was abolish all laws, except those about elementary violence and robbery. But all of the complexity of law was removed, and historically the Han Dynasty marked the height of Chinese civilization.  It was a period of real peace and great sophistication.  It was China’s Golden Age, although I may be oversimplifying it a bit, as all historians do.

            This marvelous reign was based on the whole idea of the humanism of the Far East, recognizing that although human beings are scalawags, they are no more so than cats and dogs and birds.  So you must trust human nature, because if you can’t, you’re apt to starve.”

 

Fractals as patterns of complex systems

Manifestation of ordered chaos, in the context of chaos theory: the notion of feedback creating repetitive patterns of smaller to larger gradiations.

 

Consciousness out of chaos?

Definitely.