Week 7 posting

"Ordered chaos" - does this sound familiar?

My step-father has spent his life as an artist. Recently I was present for conversation between him and a friend who had just retired after over 40 years of stressful, 60 hour a week kind of job. The retired man, now in late fifties, was happy to be retired but admitted to having some trouble having nothing structured to do with his day. In response to the fear of that chaos he has signed up for all sorts of classes and activities. My step-father spoke with him about the need to have open space, unstructured time in order to allow for the spark of creativity to emerge. From the chaos of open time comes the order of art or innovation.

Ordered chaos also makes me think of diagnosis in medicine but particularly Chinese medicine. We gather information from the patient, details and details which seem to create no rhyme or reason. But then the magic of differential diagnosis - the details create patterns and we can treat from there. But there certainly can be a moment when it seems like the land has been pulled out from under us until the chaos becomes somewhat ordered and there's even room for contradictions (deficiency and excess, heat and cold, etc.).

Fractals as patterns of complex systems:

In the article about chaos and creativity there is mention that even human history is a self-organizing chaotic system. Is this just another way of saying history repeats itself? It's hard for me to believe that there's order to our human created chaos. Even though there are repeated habits of violence, conquest, innovation, alliance. It doesn't really seem like that would create an 'historical fractal'.

Consciousness out of chaos?

It seems like the presence of consciousness is almost accidental - in the same way that life on earth is accidental (unless, of course, you believe in intelligent design...). It just so happens that the big bang happened, planet earth was formed, chemicals came together and created the first forms of life, these forms of life evolved, and then we have consciousness. All of this could have happened in an infinite number of other manners which could have left 'consciousness' by the wayside. I'm not sure that this randomness of evolution is a form of chaos - perhaps this is more a thought in regards to 'ordered chaos'.

The article about chaos and consciousness used the example of thoughts and their powerful effect on depression. It makes me think of the series of books I read as a kid, the Choose Your Own Adventure series. As you read you made choices about what action would happen next so the same book could create a variety of different stories. In this same way, one thought can lead us to a really different state of consciousness, that one thought has so much power in creating our reality in the short and long-term.

Fun with Flatware Experiment:

I've always been a bit confused by how images change int he mirror. It's something that my brain has had trouble wrapping itself around. But using the knife as a mirror actually helped me to understand why an image appears flipped in the mirror. As I moved the knife blade back and forth above some words on a piece of paper I could see the letters 'fold' in on themselves. Moving the image very clearly illustrated how an image becomes flipped in the mirror.

Using the fork and a table as a sounding board is just plain totally cool. (I wish my grandfather was alive to show him - he would have gotten a kick out of that). But why doesn't my hand holding the 'handle' of the fork actual stifle the vibration from passing from the tines down into the table.

Unfortunately, I don't have any very shiny spoons so it was hard to see my reflection very clearly in my spoons. I would like to see the moment when an image flips from rightside to upside down. Makes me think of this video which has more to do with our brain and less to do with mirrors but here it is nonetheless because it's quite interesting: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QbKw0_v2clo