CHAOS THEORY - TOPOLOGICAL CHANGE

 

Lemonick, Michael D, (2002)“How Everything Works” TIME, May 20, p.67

Automata is the name of an alternative way of looking at nature and it’s uncertainty by using pixels of computer building and design. Stephen Wolfrom has produced a 1200 page overview that suggests science has been moving on the wrong track for 300 years.

In his NEW KIND OF SCIENCE, he begins with computer pixels that are black or white and finds that if the computer is left alone to wander it will create most of the shapes within the universe.

The basic premise is that anyone pixel is surrounded by different colored pixels, and the rest is up to randomness. From this simplicity, the computer keeps building and building until there is contradictions that forms order.

What Wolfram is doing is trying to symbolically represent nature. The closer the symbols become to nature the more seriously science will adhere to it.

The verdict is out, because Wolfram presents so many hypotheses to test. Thus, it may be a year or years before a judgment can be made.

Wolfram is a talent. At the age of 20, he had earned a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from

Caltech. From there, he developed computer software that became MATHEMATICAL,

and became a millionaire many times over.

It may take years to test everything stated in his new book, but if some or many of ideas become sustainable, it would suggest another facet of math that indirectly supports

chaos theory.

Levy, Stephen (2002) “Great Minds, Great Ideas” NEWSWEEK, May 21, 56-59

WOLFRAM’S NEW RULES

COMPUTER EXPERIMENTS

called Cellular Automata, can generate complicated and unpredictable patterns beginning with simple rules.

SIMPLE RULES

also underlie the vast complexity of the natural world-everything from living organisms to traffic jams to the shape of the universe

NATURE

can thus be said to run it’s course in the same way that a computer runs a program

APPLYING that idea can help solve tough problems that have baffled scientists for centuries.

ARNDT, MICHAEL (2002) “ Simple Science” BUSINESSWEEK , May 27, p. 92-94.

"No doubt his most controversial notion is the radical claim that most of what happens in nature, from the way leafs flutter in the breeze to the thought patterns of our brains, may spring from the same computational processes. "

"The weather represents computations as sophisticated as anything in our brains."

CHAOS THEORY AND SPIRITUALITY

TOPOLOGICAL CHANGE

Setzer, Susan (1999) “Whitman, Transcendentalism and the American Dream: Alliance with Nature’s Government through Language” MODERN SCIENCE AND VEDIC

SCIENCE, Volume 9, Number 1, (WWW.MUM.EDU/LIT_dept/whitman.pdf)

Dr. Setzer is a contemporary Vedic scholar and in this analysis of Transcedentalism, she

provides a current analysis of a movement that traces back to the mid 19th century.

Parenthetically, chaos theory suggests that there is an unseen order beneath numerous contradictory events. As a theory , it is non-theistic. At best, the word often used is “flow.” It is a nuetral term and other than theistic in origin. However, we are entering an area that may be of interest to scholars in both religion and literature as well as the social sciences.

Western religions are anthropomorphic and mysticism is usually called concrete mysticism. God is a creature that is beyond understanding. Christian mystics describe difference of matter and theism by “accidents” and “substance.” Jews describe the holy other in the KABULA, and the Nation of Islam usually describes mysticism through the Sufi’s.

Eastern religions see God as an oversoul. The unseen is “wu” (Taoism) “suchness” Buddhism, or for Hindu’s, it is NAMARUPA or “presence.”

As Setzer notes in a lengthy analysis of transcentalism of the mid 19th century and current Vedic (Hindu) thought is that matter and spirit may be connected. Language is part of matter and can be directly connected to spirit through poetry and perhaps other aesthetic forms. Language can even unify the chaos in society although deconstructionist would argue against this.

Setzer* provides an exhaustive account of culture, religion, society, history, the self

in trying to rescue the criticisms of the transcentalists by post modern literary critics.

The authors do not have the time or space to make a complete review of her excellent article, but would ask the reader to make their own assessment. She does describe various levels of consciousness and the connection to language, and the language of culture.

Sociology and social psychology’s symbolic interaction may compliment Setzer’s analysis. The self was borrowed from transcendentalism. The self is composed of the “I” and the “Me.” The “I” is the special spark from God (the atman) or spontaneous self. The “Me” is the social portion of the self that is predictable so that the fabric of society

can remain in tact. There are portions of us that require us to be group creatures so that

the machinary of society can continue. How we vary from each other as individuals is the search in the universe of a grain of sand or in the very innermost portion of the “I.”

Symbolic interactionist maintain that language creates the mind and the self. Today, that is considered too deterministic, because the self has now been explored in the material sense of brain physiology and the non-material in terms of mysticism and related.

Setzer’s entire article in some ways reconnects the self with matter and spirit in spite of the deconstructionists assumptions that we are creatures with minimal root metaphors and that we must assume that there is a reality however socially constructed and spurious.

For the purposes of this book, we wander too far. We want to acknowledge the unseen and suggest that it MAY play a part in the chaotic underpinnings that create macro order.

It surely compliments chaos theory.

*Setzer is now Setzer-Anderson.