Sod's Law =?

The dry humoured thought occurred to me yesterday "it's obvious when you know - though it's not obvious why you didn't know in the first place". Now is that a paradox or a conundrum? I guess it's obvious when you know..

And following on from that, why is it that as someone once said to me "you have to make your own luck" when so-called 'bad luck' makes itself thanks to sod's law?! - which by a stroke of irony even has it's own mathematical representation these days as ((U+C+I) x (10-S))/20 x A x 1/(1-sin(F/10)).

Yep

Just back onto posting to Chaos Nation - thanks; don't have a heck of a lot to say accept that it is possible to integrate chaos/complexity into personal activity, but this may make one appear a little strange. Dry humour ey, can't beat it! But seriously folks it's a theme I'm really interested in exploring/exploiting if only so I can get the job I want right now, for example.

Punking Darwin

In response to Keith Warren on the CHAOPSYC list server, I wanted to take a beat here to address his question to me and clarify some aspects of intelligent design that get lost in the theater of Darwinism vs. Creationism.

Keith says: The goal in science is to demonstrate a natural mechanism that will explain a given phenomenon. Positing a supernatural mechanism is just a punt. So, again, what's your theory? Why is it better than Darwinian selection? Where is the evidence, preferably peer-reviewed? Build a better theory and the world will beat a path to your door. But ID doesn't have a theory at all.

Walter ReMine's book - The Biotic Message develops the design side of it on several levels, one of which is the presupposition of science needing to find natural mechanisms for phenomenon. I'm not sure what spooks people from ID more - the subject aspect of the effects of intelligence on life processes or the implications of the concept of design. Anyway, you wanted my big theory, so I'll boil it down to the only life that contains both sides of the argument - my own. My peer-reviewed papers, albeit not by NDPLS :(, are posted here and here. You'll find plenty of familiar friends in the references so I'm sure those 6 year old papers will be enough.

Science -- and I'm being conventional here - places the notion of falsifiability in the face of all 'pretenders' to the throne. The problem -- and I'm being unconventional here - is that Occam's Razor cuts both directions...

Darwin, who's work goes far beyond natural selection btw, did for biology what the periodic table of elements did for chemistry. In a nutshell, it gave us a map. What Gavin (I hope that's you?) was trying to get across in his posts was the notion that there's a presupposition Darwin has the best map around re: evolution. The LOL part for me is that hard core science types shudder when Darwin's model is framed a just another theory. The open-ended nature of scientific inquiry is predicated on the willingness of the scientist to dismiss their old take on things when a more lucid, 'observable' (OK, physicists get around this one), and most of all useful fiction comes along to improve the narrative modern science began 500 years ago. Science - and I'm being conventional again - collectively bristles when they get lumped in with other disciplines that are more at home with their storytelling, time-binding nature. It's only now, in the post-metaphysical Integral Age, that we have the resources to 'unpack' the jewel from the molasses and get into that dirty topic of subjectivity.

Once science gets fluent in discussing the dynamics of imagination and presupposition from a 1st person perspective, both individually and culturally, it will be able to put their more 3rd person-based skills of observation and expectation into their appropriate framework. Until then, Darwin gets to mind his map...

And we get to punk his dead ass, MRF 06.23

Inertia - The Beauty of Chaotic Indifference

Yesterday was an off day. Yet, for some reason, everything got done that had to get done. The perpetual list of lingering projects, preparations for the summer, and the George Foreman BBQ (btw, Bubba Burgers, yum) were all traversed. The the often underrated emotional tonifying benefits of 'sacking out' were enjoyed.

So, in the end, what's so unexceptable about inertia? I think it's a valuable thing to possess, even cherish. Face it, the world loves to bully us around. All we can do is delay change, we can't deny it. Inertia at least gives us a place to stop the ferris wheel and look around a little. Of course, it's a question of proportion. Too much interia and we become inert. That's no fun. Too little inertia and we're the unabomber with no 'order parameter' to reign ourselves in...

Nonlinear dyamics avoids the subject of inertia, often copping out by using those wonderful psychobabble labels, resistance, boundary conditons and my personal favorite - borderline personality. NDS loves motion, change, flux, etc..Inertia?
What's that? What's ironic is that neutrinos (which still sounds like the name of a breakfast cereal) may be a basic building block of the universe. Maybe the key to like is to find the inertia in us and use it to re-charge our 'batteries' for the next wave of self-organization. Maybe there's a reason for pressing pause...

Driving under a yellow flag, MRF 05.31

Britney Smears

In the never-ending effort to ensure the meme of chaos remains forever linked with disorder, randomness and in this case, schlock narcissism, Britney Spears and her new husband, Kevin Federline named their six-part 'reality show' - Britney & Kevin: Chaotic. Hyping the show as raw, and as one review offers makes Nick and Jessica look like Fulbright scholars. It made me wonder how all ill-formed memes, chaos included, eventually Jump the Shark, which is itself a good meme that tracks the catastrophe side of that cusp-catastrophe dynamic.

Whenever you look at any slice of pop culture, you're really looking at an iterative environment even though it appears to be recursive. Key ideas are recycled, even within career paths. Britney has drawn from the American innocence of Sandra Dee which was then exploited in the film Grease only to be raw material for Madonna, who embedded all of that for Britney.

So while the core message of a virginal lolitta, who subsequently loses her innocence, descending into sexpot status, only to re-emerge as enlightened monogamous wife and mother is not new, Britney has compressed all that into about a 6-year cycle. This fractal compression of what is normally a 20-year process (as it was with Madonna) waters down the impact and overall resiliency of the memes associated with the source or media virus.

As with chaos theory, once the culture finds a way to pigeon-hole the core concepts into established and more stable ideological structures (butterfly effect, natural disasters, end of the world scenarios), it's up to the meme engineerto mutate the message and steer it into more viable vectors. The best memes tap into either sex or violence or both, since survival draws from both extremes. Ambiguity and paradox also help memes find worldspace to grow.

Question: Does the recent Newsweek scandal suggest that the us-them aspect of the first tier vMemes are undergoing such an engineering process that will cause the dividing line to revert back to the West vs.The World and not itself?

Discontinuously, MRF 05.19

Plateaus Suck!

Did you ever get the feeling you were late to the paradigm? It's so strange these days to keep reading how the 'cutting edge' keeps moving faster than those supposedly in it?

Seth Godin, author and overall nudge (in a good way!) drew a map for us recently...
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2005/05/the_new_digital.html

Inside the world of Chaos Nation, none of this surprises us. We have this little pal called Moore's Law - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore's_law#Formulations_of_Moore.27s_law that had this all called in advance back in 1965! Now the attention is shifting from just tracking the upper limits of technological advances of integrated circuits to the more far-reaching impact of the Law of Accelerating Returns, which among other things forecasts rates of progress that will lead to The Singularity -- technological change so rapid and profound it represents a rupture in the fabric of human history. The implications include the merger of biological and nonbiological intelligence, immortal software-based humans, and ultra-high levels of intelligence that expand outward in the universe at the speed of light. Ouch! This smacks of the AI visions that have not exactly fit this curve...Observe:

"An analysis of the history of technology shows that technological change is exponential, contrary to the common-sense "intuitive linear" view. So we won't experience 100 years of progress in the 21st century -- it will be more like 20,000 years of progress (at today's rate). Ray Kurzweil -

http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0134.html?printable=1

Why do I mention all this? Way over on the 'other side' of the house, there's a little backwater in consciousness studies called dromology. It's steward, Paul Virilio says this:

"Three physical barriers are given: sound, heat and light. The first two have already been felled. The sound barrier has been cut across by the super- and hypersonic aircraft, while the heat barrier is penetrated by the rocket taking human beings outside the earth's orbit in order to land them on the moon But the third barrier, that of light, is not something one can cross: you crash into it. It is precisely this barrier of time which confronts history in the present day." -

http://online.sfsu.edu/~rpurser/revised/pages/DROMOLOGY.htm

Seems like both the techies and the metaphorists in Chaos Nation have the same idea.

I wonder if they'll both show up 'in time'?

Off the clock, MRF 05.12

What's it to ya?

Rather than take the slow and engaging route, and in the interest of getting to the point, which is to elicit the feedback of people inside and outside of the SCTPLS, I've posted 5 more feedback questions to ponder for May. Please comment as often as you'd like and then comment on the comments of others. I'll monitor as needed.

1) How can chaos theory factor in artistic and philosophical applications of it's principles?

2) Where do you learn about chaos theory the most? the web? other media? formal training?

3) What defines the limits/boundaries of chaos theory to you? When is NOT the best approach?

4) What elementary subject best introduces chaos theory? Math? Science? Language? Art?

5) What draws you to apply chaos theory personally and professionally?

Don't like the questions? Ask another one. See where it takes us...

Tacitly, MRF 05.02