Heidegger

19/04/2009. _Saicho at aol.com_ (mailto:Saicho@aol.com) writes:

Chaos v. Order

Some Rambling Thoughts on Order, Chaos and Complexity.

Hi Richard,
Renewed apologies for the delay in my response. I am taking a brief respite
from my DIY activities. The new extension is now complete and the next
project is to have a bathroom completely ripped out and the bath removed
entirely to be replaced by a walk-in shower etc. I hope that you too are feeling
a lot better and enjoying your Californian sunshine by your favourite seat
and table in the garden amongst the natural beauty you love so much.

Richard:
My dictionary gives as its first definition of *order* as: the arrangement
or disposition of people or things in relation to each other according to a
particular sequence, pattern or method. Other, and there are many,
definitions are not to the point of this piece – including one dealing with the
Order of the Garter, originated by King Edward III as the highest order of
English knighthood. After some thought following my response to Georges
regarding ordered systems, etc. I have thought more about this issue. I have set
up the following definitions – for that is all that they can be.

Jud:
Approaching the subject honestly and open-mindedly (and what you will
recognise - perhaps with a sigh - as predictably,) I need to say at the outset
that the way I now think ontologically has little in common at all with
the traditional human semantic definitions which constitute the entablature of
philosophical discourse. Such a view deserves a discussion of its own I
know - for how can I make any sensible observations or comments if I reject
the basic definitional language of an inherited pattern of thought and
language? In this regard I crave your patience and forbearance. This is
further complicated by the inescapable fact that I am (to a large extent) myself
trapped within the web of reification and entification that characterises
modern debate and the crude semantic anomalies with which I (like all youth
were and still are) have been brainwashed and which are as difficult to
remove as shit from a suede shoe.

In spite of the bad press that has been given to Kant in some quarters I
firmly believe that all objects exist as *things in themselves* and that the
existential modalities of cosmic matergy (objects/energy/fields) as
characterised by humans merely reflect the nature of human perception and not the
way that observed objects actually exist but rather the way that their
human observers exist.

Thus, meta-definitively, I reject the idea of *order* and *chaos* out of
hand - as no more ontologically valid than that it is a fair definition of
how the human brain perceives and differentiates communities of objects with
regard to the human need to suss-out its current environment, understand
what the brain perceives as: particular sequences and patterns. (see your
TWTWI.) For me the bald fact that man is a pattern-seeking organism whose
survivalist modus operandi relies on the recognition of perceptual structures
does not mean that those structures actually exist many of which are no more
than human conventions.

For me personification or the attribution of assigning or attributing the
human-like behavioural characteristics of acting in an *orderly* or
*chaotic* manner to non-human and insensate objects is a residuum of religious
thinking and puts me in mind of the 1386 public hanging in France of a pig for
the murder of a child. Obviously the assumption was that the pig had an
immutable soul and was capable of forethought. Richard:

There is only one condition or situation that should be considered as
having order: a collection of spatial or temporal events/objects that contain an
aspect of repetition. One can include symmetry as an ingredient, in that
symmetry is a kind of repeated form or pattern, event or perspective. One
can assess the degree of order by deducing the repetition involved. This can
be done either using human perception, which is fairly good at this, or one
can go about it mathematically using an autocorrelation function and a
numerical representation of the system or process.

Jud:
As a description of the way humans reach certain perceptually arrived-at
conclusions the above is a very good account. It has interesting echoes of
Hume’s observation that repetition is the basis upon which we reach certain
conclusions regarding the reification: *causation.* Is it possible that his
analysis of the abstraction *cause* could be extended to include
abstractions like *symmetry* and *repetition* as an ingredients of the abstraction:
*order*, in that symmetry is a kind of repeatable, Platonic-like,
homo-centric advantaging and favouring form or pattern, event or perspective?

Richard:
There is both spatial and temporal order. The steady ticking of the clock
is temporal order; the arrangement of the keys on my keyboard are spatially
ordered. A swarm of gnats or Browinian motion can said to have an
*arrangement,* and yet are not orderly in the sense of which I speak. The dictionary
definition is fine as far as it goes, but the *particular sequence,
pattern or method,* must be further clarified.

Jud:
My belief, intuition or position on the subject is that the cosmos and all
that is *in it* is *self-governing* and that nothing is related to or
limited by time - simply because *time* does not exist. What exists are objects
(and to save space, whenever I use the word *objects* I mean matergy/field
etc.) which are timed by humans using the objects most familiar to them -
our own earth, the moon and the sun with regards to their rotational
modalities. In other words it is not some humanly conceived abstraction *time*
which governs the rotary motions of the spheres - but the spheres themselves
which are in their turn governed by the change (behaviour) of the other
objects with which they share what we call the cosmos. For me, what I call *the
existential imperative* or *the material imperative* (or if you like
*matter*) dictates that *that which cannot change* cannot exist and that matergy
is in constant change and that there are NO INTERSTICES at all between the
more obvious changes picked up by human perception and that as constant
change is a prerequisite of existing matter *time* neither exists nor is a
necessary requirement of the existential imperative.

Richard:
The concept of order comes from the human brain – there is no such thing as
order having some ontic reality.

Jud:
We are in complete agreement on this point Richard.

Richard:
We sense order because we sense repetition and/or symmetry in much of what
we perceive.

Jud:
Very true and Hume would nod his head in enthusiastic agreement too.

Richard:
We are generally more comfortable with order than with disorder – which
some mistakenly call *chaos.* The reason for this is that the very fact that
order contains repetition provides a sense of grasping what is going on,
some sense of predictability, thus some kind of understanding. In fact, we
very much depend on order in our lives in a variety of ways.

Jud:
Yes, we are pattern-seeking creature - which goes back to your seminal
piece: *The Way The World Is.*

Richard:
One test of what is and what is not orderly is the ability to capture,
espistemically, what it is that possesses order. As mentioned above, this can
be done by using an autocorrelation function that assesses the repetitive
aspects of some process. This requires the ability to capture the process and
turn it into numbers. If this cannot be done, even as potentially
possible, one cannot determine the degree of order involved. It cannot be done on a
container of moving gas molecules, or on a swarm of gnats. If it cannot be
done, it must be assumed that the process is not orderly, or is random in
nature.

Jud:
All very true. The human genius for detecting pattern and structuring are
response to objects is configurations we best understand extends not only to
our development of the notion of *time* but also a abstracting contiguous
objects as notional count nouns which can be applied first to any objects
and ultimately to reifications in an object-free mathematical realm of their
own. As to the assumption that the behaviour of individual gnats or single
gas particles being chaotic - that is (as you hint) a wrongful assumption..
Each gnat adopts non-collision strategies in a swarm and in that sense its
behaviour is hard-wired and therefore determined. So too gas particles are
also restricted in their behaviour by the existential imperatives of
continuing to exist as gas-particles. The human notion of *chaos* is simply a
face-saving euphemism used to
*cover-up* those features of the existential imperative which are not
understood.

Chaos

*Chaos* is often confused with *disorder,* but contemporary investigations
of certain kinds of apparently disorderly processes indicate that such
processes are not necessarily disordered as that term is used above. James
Gleick, in his book Chaos – Making a New Science, says:

*Chaos posses problems that defy accepted ways of working in science. It
makes strong claims about the universal behavior of complexity.*

The eddies and swirls one observes in a stream or the giant red spot on
Jupiter are not *disorderly,* in the sense of the swarm of gnats or in
Brownian motion. They possess structure; they have varying degrees of repetition.
They are not at all random in nature. They can be analyzed, even
duplicated, as the swarm of gnats cannot be. [The best that might be done regarding
simulating systems like gnats would be a 3-d random point producing program
that might look like a swarm of gnats, but would not be based on the
physics of gnat motion.]

Jud:
All the above is posited on the assumption that there exist euphemistic
abstractions such as: disorder, chaos, and disarray and other such physical
conditions which humans perceive as a disturbance of normal functioning. Such
general concepts created by extracting common features from specific
examples no more exist than the abstractions *Love, beauty or political
integrity.

Richard:
Complexity
Chaos theory deals with complexity, but not *randomness.* Just because a
system or process is complex, does not mean it has no order. And just because
some equation has *order* in its structure, does not mean that what it
produces will necessarily produce an ordered result. An example is the power
series expansion that produces pi. The integers produced are apparently
unordered, or completely random in nature. To date, all attempts to find some
repetitive or organized pattern in the series has failed.

What is complexity? There are many definitions, depending on the
application. The Space Shuttle has an estimated one million parts; is it a complex
system? Most cars contain roughly a hundred or so moving parts; is it a
complex system? Is a high-rise building a complex system? Is the human body? It
is estimated that a human body contains as many as 100 trillion cells.
Further, each cell contains over a hundred active and passive constituent
parts. Not only are the sheer numbers of these things a contribution to
complexity, the trillions of interconnections intensify that complexity. The
billions of water molecules in even a small section of a stream behave in a
complex manner, but generally do not behave *randomly.* The complexity of eddies
and turbulence does not mean there is no order – only that that order is
quite difficult to discern and understand.

Complexity can be conveniently be divided into several categories:

Static complexity

Functional complexity

Passive complexity

Active complexity

[not all mutually exclusive]

Examples of static complexity is that of a salt or ice crystal. There may
be millions of components, but there is no change or motion at the macro
level. [The reductionist particle physicist would argue here that below the
atomic level there is lots going on, but reductive analysis must stop
somewhere and I stop at the atom or molecule!] Functional complexity deals with
elements in a system that change and interact. Passive complexity comes about
through external agents, forces, etc. A stream or bubbling boiling water
is passively complex. Active complexity is exemplified by the living cell,
or the human body, whose many components do things on their own and in
conjunction with other agents.

What has complexity to do with order and chaos? One cannot claim that the
more complex a system, the more prone to chaos or randomness it is. But one
can claim that the more chaotic a system, the more complex it is.

Just some thoughts that might stir more thoughts…..

Jud:
The identification of what is complex and what is simple is another
abstraction which has more to do with the concerns of the human attributer than
with the actual existential *thing as it is.* Who is to say whether a fly’s
brain is more complex that the guidance-system of the lunar module? For me
the section above on: Static complexity, Functional complexity, Passive
complexity and Active complexity are mereological questions akin to our
sometimes referring to the night-sky as being full of stars and sometimes
referring to it as *The Milky way* (our universe.) Does a heap of sand exist as a
macro *heap* or a vast collection of individuate particles? Does an
ice-cube exist as a block of ice or a myriad assemblage of frozen water
particulates?.

If (as I do) one rejects the existence of *change or motion* and holds that
only *changing objects* can exist, then if (notionally) change or motion
stops (is denied) at the level of the atom or molecule then they nor the
block of ice would not exist in the first place. In the sense that I hold that
*nothing* (a true vacuum) is an existential impossibility the idea that
passive complexity comes about through external agents, forces, etc. is yet
another mereological descriptive choice. Does the fender (UK bumper) of your
car crumple as a *subjective response* to the impingement of the lamppost
- or does it actively collapse in such a way as to deform in such a manner
to affect as much damage-limitation as possible on the basis that all
objects are compelled (by the EP) to change in such a manner that retains as
much of their *morphological niche* as possible in accordance with conatus?

I suppose that because we are human pattern-seekers it is natural that once
having perceived repetitive patterns we categorise and formulate such
perceptions as TWTWI. Communicatively we are in thrall to the language we have
inherited - to try to see and describe the world as it really is, as
impossible as seeing ourselves as we really are. I try, predictably not very
successfully, to perceive the word through non-human eyes. The only way that
even a smidgeon of success can be gained is by an elimination of the
abstractions we use as convenient euphemisms for that which we do not understand.
Such reifico-iconoclasm is (for me) a satisfying (path finding) step in the
right direction towards the ontological heterodoxy or what my American
hero James Woodard called the *reality connectedness* I crave before I die.

Warm Regards,

Jud.

—————————————————————————-
———————————
Reifications - like biological entozoa are gut-enculturations which are not

necessarily reliant upon nor benignly disposed to the welfare of their
hosts.
—————————————————————————-
———————————-

Sincerely,

Jud Evans.

Private Website: _http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/index.htm_
 http://evans-experientialism.freewebspac…)

*Common sense and a sense of humour are the same thing, moving at different
speeds. A sense of humour is just common sense, dancing.*
(William James.)

—————————————————————————-
———————————
Reifications - like biological entozoa are gut-enculturations which are not

necessarily reliant upon nor benignly disposed to the welfare of their
hosts.
—————————————————————————-
———————————-

Sincerely,

Jud Evans.

Private Website: _http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/index.htm_
 http://evans-experientialism.freewebspac…)

*Common sense and a sense of humour are the same thing, moving at
different speeds. A sense of humour is just common sense, dancing.*
(William James.)

Posted on Sunday, May 10th, 2009 at 6:00 am
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