Order and Disorder

"Like the librarians of Babel in Borges’s story, who are looking for the book that will provide them with the key to all the others, we oscillate between the illusion of perfection and the vertigo of the unattainable. In the name of completeness, we would like to believe that a unique order exists that would enable us to accede in knowledge all in one go; in the name of the unattainable, we would like to think that order and disorder are in fact the same word, denoting pure chance.

It’s possible also that both are decoys, illusions intended to disguise the erosion of both books and systems. It is no bad thing in any case that between the two our bookshelves should serve from time to time as joggers of the memory, as cat-rests and as lumber-rooms."

- Georges Perec (1936 - 1982)
Species of Spaces and Other Pieces

Amorphous Morphology

"I claim that many patterns of Nature are so irregular and fragmented, that, compared with Euclid - a term used in this work to denote all of standard geometry - Nature exhibits not simply a higher degree but an altogether different level of complexity ... The existence of these patterns challenges us to study these forms that Euclid leaves aside as being 'formless,' to investigate the morphology of the 'amorphous.' Mathematicians have disdained this challenge, however, and have increasingly chosen to flee from nature by devising theories unrelated to anything we can see or feel."

- Benoit Mandelbrot (1924 - 2010)
The Fractal Geometry of Nature

Acausal Order

"If you marry the ordered to the
chaos you produce the divine child,
the supreme meaning beyond
meaning and meaninglessness."

- C. G. Jung (1875-1961)

"In 1952, through his collaboration with the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Wolfgang Pauli, Jung argued that there existed a principle of acausal orderedness that underlay such "meaningful coincidences," which he called synchronicity. He claimed that under certain circumstances, the constellation of an archetype led to a relativization of time and space, which explained how such events could happen. This was an attempt to expand scientific understanding to accommodate events such as his visions of 1913 and 1914."

- Sonu Shamdasani (1962 - )
The Red Book: Liber Novus

Secret Order

"In all chaos there is a cosmos,
in all disorder a secret order."

- C. G. Jung (1875-1961)

Borgesian Batesonian Patterns

"It turns out that

an eerie type of chaos

can lurk just behind

a facade of order;

and yet, deep inside the chaos

lurks an even eerier type of order."

 -  Douglas R. Hofstadter (1945 - )

Metamagical Themas:Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern

Postscript. Clicking on the image at the top will take you to a new "Ice Forms" portfolio I've posted on my web gallery. On the other hand, the image below - which shows an amalgam of the 16 photographs in this gallery - has a curious aesthetic all its own.

 

Apart from my lifelong attraction to "order within chaos within order within..." (both as photographer and physicist), the Borgesian Batesonian in me is drawn to the all-but-invisible emergent patterns that connect the patterns we (only partly consciously) weave. While the individual images hold no more relation to one another than the fact that they were all captured along the same 10-foot-long shoreline of a local lake during a single happy hour of searching for "ice forms" a few days ago when the temperature dipped into the single digits, the "amalgam" is at once both strangely familiar (as though I had "seen" it lurking somewhere within the frozen water) and alluringly alien (since, though it is undeniably something my camera "captured," it is also something I could not have possibly observed). It's random-yet-not-random frozen forms and eddies hint at some mysterious (creative - living?) froth that periodically dispenses with aesthetically pleasing patterns that photographers "catch" glimpses of and then call their own.

Improvisational Nature

"Perhaps the answers to these questions require fundamental advances at the interface of physics, the arts, and neuroscience. The deep links between musical form and physical form may be unveiled by understanding how both kinds of knowledge-music and physics-arise together in human brains and nowhere else. After all, brains, regardless of how mysterious they are, are the most complex structures in the universe.

...

It is amusing to speculate that the reason why music has the ability to move us so deeply is that it is an auditory allusion to our basic connection to the universe. If our cosmic origins are seated in sound patterns, is it too far-fetched to think that music viscerally enables us to tap into those origins?

...

What if there were a vibrational pattern
in the early universe capable of
generating the current complex
structure that we live in,
the complex structures that we are?
And what if these structures
had an improvisational nature."

- Stephon Alexander (1971 - )
The Jazz of Physics

Idea Chasing

"Chaos is what we’ve lost touch with. This is why it is given a bad name. It is feared by the dominant archetype of our world, which is Ego, which clenches because its existence is defined in terms of control...The creative act is a letting down of the net of human imagination into the ocean of chaos on which we are suspended, and the attempt to bring out of it ideas.  It is the night sea journey, the lone fisherman on a tropical sea with his nets, and you let these nets down – sometimes, something tears through them that leaves them in shreds and you just row for shore, and put your head under your bed and pray.  At other times what slips through are the minutiae, the minnows of this ichthyological metaphor of idea chasing. But, sometimes, you can actually bring home something that is food, food for the human community that we can sustain ourselves on and go forward."

- Terence McKenna (1946 - 2000)

Sameness and Novelty

"A rhythm involves a pattern and to that extent is always self-identical. But no rhythm can be a mere pattern; for the rhythmic quality depends equally upon the differences involved in each exhibition of the pattern. The order of rhythm is therefore a structure of deviating repetitions... The essence of rhythm is the fusion of sameness and novelty; so that the whole never loses the essential unity of the pattern, while the parts exhibit the contrast arising from the novelty of their detail."

- Alfred North Whitehead (1861 - 1947) 

Different Perspectives

"Question: You mean it's a matter of different perspectives?
Each person has a different reason for being here;
if a person looked at it from the outside, he'd see
us all sitting here and maybe wouldn't know why.
And then...?

Trungpa Rinpoche: I mean we are trying to unify ourselves through confusion.

Question: The more confusion, the more unity?

Trungpa Rinpoche: That’s what tantric people say.

Question: You mean the more confusion there is,
the more difficult it is to stamp a system on reality?

Trungpa Rinpoche: You see, chaos has an order by virtue
of which it isn’t really chaos. But when there’s no chaos,
no confusion, there is luxury, comfort.
Comfort and luxury lead you more into
samsara, creating more luxurious situations
adds further to your collection of chaos.
All these luxurious conclusions come back on
you and you begin to question them,
which leads you to the further understanding
that, after all, this discomfort has order in it."

- The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa, Volume 4

Maximizing Play

"In terms of the game theory, we might say the universe is so constituted as to maximize play. The best games are not those in which all goes smoothly and steadily toward a certain conclusion, but those in which the outcome is always in doubt. Similarly, the geometry of life is designed to keep us at the point of maximum tension between certainty and uncertainty, order and chaos. Every important call is a close one. We survive and evolve by the skin of our teeth. We really wouldn't want it any other way."

-  George Leonard (1923 - 2010)

Inner Sound

“Form itself, even if completely abstract ...

has its own inner sound.”

- Wassily Kandinsky (1866 - 1944)

“This idea that there is generality in the

specific is of far-reaching importance.”

- Douglas R. Hofstadter (1945 - )

Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

“A map is not the territory it represents, but,
if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory,
which accounts for its usefulness.”

- Alfred Korzybski (1879 - 1950)
Science and Sanity

Knowing Nothing of Space

 "We do not know space.

We do not see it,

we do not hear it,

we do not feel it.

We are standing in the middle of it,

we ourselves are part of it,

but we know nothing about it."

- M.C. Escher (1898 - 1972)

Web of Time

"This web of time, the
strands of which approach
one another, bifurcate,
intersect or ignore each
other through the centuries,
embraces every possibility.
We do not exist in most of them.
In some you exist and not I,
while in others I do,
and you do not"

- Jorge Luis Borges (1899 - 1986)

"The Garden of Forking Paths" in Ficciones 

We are Stories

"We are stories,

contained within the twenty
complicated centimeters

behind our eyes,
lines drawn by traces
left by the (re)mingling
together of things in the
world, and oriented toward
the direction of increasing
entropy, in a rather particular
corner of this immense,
chaotic universe."

- Carlo Rovelli (1956 - )
The Order of Time

Cosmic Sea of Energy

"Space is not empty.
It is full, a plenum
as opposed to a vacuum,
and is the ground for
the existence of everything,
including ourselves.
The universe is not separate
from this cosmic sea
of energy.

...

Relativity and quantum theory agree, in that they both imply the need to look on the world as an undivided whole, in which all parts of the universe, including the observer and his instruments, merge and unite in one totality. In this totality, the atomistic form of insight is a simplification and an abstraction, valid only in some limited context.

...

The essential feature in
quantum interconnectedness
is that the whole universe
is enfolded in everything,
and that each thing is
enfolded in the whole."

- David Bohm (1917 - 1992)

Geological Time

"In reality, a river's basic shape... is not a line but a tree. A river is, in its essence, a thing that branches... Although it flows inward toward its trunk, in geological time it grew, and continues to grow, outward, like an organism, from its ocean outlet to its many headwaters. In the vernacular of a new science, it is fractal, its structure echoing itself on all scales, from river to stream to brook to creek to rivulet, branches too small to name and too many to count."

-  James Gleick (1954 - )
Nature's Chaos

An Element of Absolute Chance

"We must...suppose an element of absolute chance, sporting, spontaneity, originality, freedom in nature. We must further suppose that this element in the ages of the past was indefinitely more prominent than now, and that the present almost exact conformity to law is something that has been gradually brought about... If the universe is thus progressing from a state of all but pure chance to a state of all but complete determination by law, we must suppose that there is an original elemental tendency of things to acquire determinate properties, to take habits. This is the third or mediating element between chance, which brings forth First and original events, and law which produces sequences or Seconds... This tendency must itself have been gradually evolved; and it would evidently tend to strengthen itself... Here then is a rational physical hypothesis, which is calculated to account, or all but account for everything in the universe except pure originality itself."

- Charles Saunders Peirce (1839 - 1914)
The Monist (1890-1893), quoted in Truth, Rationality, and
Pragmatism: Themes from Peirce by Christopher Hookway

Middle Ground

"We now know that complexity arises in a middle ground—often at the order–disorder border. Natural systems that evolve with and learn from interaction with their immediate environment exhibit both structural order and dynamical chaos. Order is the foundation of communication between elements at any level of organization, whether that refers to a population of neurons, bees or humans. For an organism order is the distillation of regularities abstracted from observations. An organism’s very form is a functional manifestation of its ancestor’s evolutionary and its own developmental memories.

A completely ordered universe, however, would be dead. Chaos is necessary for life. Behavioural diversity, to take an example, is fundamental to an organism’s survival. No organism can model the environment in its entirety. Approximation becomes essential to any system with finite resources. Chaos, as we now understand it, is the dynamical mechanism by which nature develops constrained and useful randomness. From it follow diversity and the ability to anticipate the uncertain future. 

There is a tendency, whose laws we are beginning to comprehend, for natural systems to balance order and chaos, to move to the interface between predictability and uncertainty. The result is increased structural complexity. This often appears as a change in a system’s intrinsic computational capability. The present state of evolutionary progress indicates that one needs to go even further and postulate a force that drives in time towards successively more sophisticated and qualitatively different intrinsic computation. We can look back to times in which there were no systems that attempted to model themselves, as we do now. This is certainly one of the outstanding puzzles: how can lifeless and disorganized matter exhibit such a drive? The question goes to the heart of many disciplines, ranging from philosophy and cognitive science to evolutionary and developmental biology and particle astrophysics. The dynamics of chaos, the appearance of pattern and organization, and the complexity quantified by computation will be inseparable components in its resolution."

- James P. Crutchfield (1955 - )
Between order and chaos

Edge of Chaos

"Complex systems have evolved which may have learned to balance divergence and convergence, so that they're poised between chaos and order ... It's precisely those systems that can simultaneously perform the most complex tasks and evolve, in the sense that they can accumulate successive useful variations. The very ability to adapt is itself, I believe, the consequence of evolution. You have to be a certain kind of complex system to adapt, and you have to be a certain kind of complex system to coevolve with other complex systems. We have to understand what it means for complex systems to come to know one another — in the sense that when complex systems coevolve, each sets the conditions of success for the others. I suspect that there are emergent laws about how such complex systems work, so that, in a global, Gaia-like way, complex coevolving systems mutually get themselves to the edge of chaos, where they're poised in a balanced state."

- Stuart Kauffman (1939 - )

Limits of Comprehension

"Man is not born to

solve the problem

of the universe,

but to find out

what he has to do;

and to restrain himself

within the limits

of his comprehension."

- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 - 1832)