| Choc & Chaos Chaos & Vital Energy Carlo Ricciardi July 1998  • Intro • Chaos & Vital Energy |
At the beginning of the Eighties they said that complexity was exploding and becoming a pure object of propagation and diffusion. In order to govern it one cited Niklas Luhman, to communicate it one invoked Jurgen Habermas. Sociologists and political scientists attempted as best they could to "reduce" it, as one reduces a fracture. Philippe Schmitter published a paper on neo-corporativism.
One takes advantage of metaphors drawn from the world of science: Heisenberg’s principle of indetermination, and anything else that creates imprecision, undecidability and incomputability. One works on the concept of complexity, invoking polytheism and relativism. Life, society and politics are viewed as so many winding labyrinths. Philosophers are abandoning the powerful, big ideas and beginning to speak of reality as "dense", of "maps" and "strategies", all the while bearing in mind that the real problem is keeping up an appearance of rationality in a world that is totally lacking reason, goals and purposes.
Politicians are beginning to think about how they can simplify this complex reality, because the institution of proportional representation only serves to intensify the confusion, reducing debate to the level of inarticulate babel. As it so happens, the prescription that is applied in most cases involves a formula of simplification: reducing the complexity to a "dual", binary, one and zero alternative.
Kevin Kelly, the founding father of Wired, in an essay entitled New Rules for The New Economy: 10 Radical Strategies for a Connected World attempts to focus the attention of the new millennium’s management class on a few key points, cornerstones of the current digital economy. The deconstruction of businesses and the permanent instability of its components have become two essential factors in the development equation. The lack of complex situations and total predictability are, on the other hand, indictors of a lack of essential flexibility.
Pietro Greco in Evoluzioni. Dal Big Bang a Wall Street - la sintesi impossibile (Evolutions: From the Big Bang to Wall Street - the impossible synthesis) maintains that all the structures we see around ourselves, from the forests and oceans, to the Monalisa and the Internet, are not the necessary and predictable fruit of a unique and ineluctable Principle, a Grande Algorithm, but rather the unique and contingent product of an intertwining of the fundamental laws of physics and the unpredictable series of events that constitute their concrete realizations.
They are the fruit of History, no a Plan.
The phenomenon known as "True Polar Wander", a sudden migration of the terrestrial poles that occurred some 520 million years ago, according to the theory proposed by paleontologist, Joseph Kirschink, a professor at Caltech in Pasadena, is offered as the original, primal example of the absolute absence of rules in evolution: the cause of this mammoth geological upheaval could well have been completely fortuitous and, therefore, totally unpredictable.
A similar approach tends to render much more difficult the construction of any sort of "theory about everything", a fundamental law of nature capable of making matter organize itself and increase its level of order by means of its own complexity.
This will probably provide plenty of food for thought for think tanks, like the Santa Fe Institute, where during the middle of the Eighties a brain trust (composed of the Nobel prize winning physicist, Murray Gell-Mann; economist, Kenneth Arrow and researchscientist, Stuart Kauffman) concentrated all its efforts on discovering this unifying principle, the key features of which were outlined in Complexity by Morris Mitchell Waldrop, published way back in 1987.
The Turbulent Landscapes exhibit presented by the Exploratorium of San Francisco, one of the most important scientific museums in the world, is a very successful case of the propagation and diffusion of theories of complexity, the most spectacular representation of which was constituted by a scale model reproducing the formation of a hurricane. The web version of the same very compelling exhibit (http://www.exploratorium.edu/complexity/menu.html) features 13 "turbulent landscapes", 13 works of art in which fog, wind, smoke and mud are utilized in a spectacular manner to reproduce the effects of electrical storms, avalanches and volcanic eruptions. Site visitors can move around freely inside the virtual installation, managing to get very close to the models and, in some cases, actually interacting with them.
The work entitled, The Emotional Brain by Joseph LeDoux contains the basis for revolutionizing the theories expounded in Emotive Intelligence by Daniel Goleman. This eminent neurological scientist has long been concentrating his efforts on the study of the cerebral cortex, the seat of man’s logical and rational faculties. Currently, LeDoux, one of the world’s leading scholars in the field of neurobiology, is focusing his attention on the deepest and most fascinating part of the brain, the medulla oblongata. He has demonstrated that this part of the brain reacts to impulses before it reacts to reason and that the decisive moments of our existence are not governed by rationality, but by the emotions’ means of comprehending: ancestral impulses of excitement, fear, heat and love that are formed in the medulla oblongata - a sensational discovery - at a profound, still unconscious level.
A clear tendency is emerging involving a generalized shift of attention away from the micro to the macro, from ever greater specialization to a more holistic view. This change of perspective involves a fundamental shift away from an ever finer, more minute focus, endlessly dividing and dissecting into tinier components and categories - indispensable, obviously, for certain operations like identifying and establishing a precise description of diseases - to an approach advocating the interaction between biology and experience, a relationship between genetic determinism and influences deriving not only from one’s personal experience, but also from ethical values and experiences shared with our fellow human beings, along the lines set forth by the Nobel prize winning neurobiologist, Edelman.
The revelations obtained by means of Pet and Spect activities (visualization techniques of the brain) are in no way denied, but more and more voices are bring raised in favor of applying such results within the context of a much broader examination of a person, conducted from multiple and complimentary points of view.
Our habitual "fear of disorder" leads us to perceive that which is exceptional and unforeseen as chaotic, rather than recognizing the positive revolutionary aspect of such events. Perhaps the popular success of Peter Howitt’s film Sliding Doors had something to do with all this. The story emphasizes the importance of the fortuitous element in life, telling us what would have happened in terms of two distinct hypothesis: if the leading character had either missed or caught the subway on a certain day (on which she had been fired from her job), illustrating how everything can hinge of an apparently insignificant detail (the time it takes for a subway car door to slide closed). Another example would be the thrilling German variation on this theme, Run Lola Run, directed by Tom Tykwer, who draws his inspiration from the same concept of alternative presents that move along parallel tracks, as so often occurs in the stories of Borges.
Since we can do absolutely nothing to combat or ward off chaos, clearly the wisest course of action is to learn how to accept it, taking the fullest possible advantage of our resources of vital energy.
The electroencephalogram of a normal person is much more chaotic and complex than that of someone who is mentally ill. For people who still don’t understand and are astonished by this assertion, associating chaos exclusively with destructive disorder, one must counter that chaos also represents extraordinary richness. Indeed, a chaotic electroencephalogram reading is a sign of mental health. Examining the patterns of an electroencephalogram chart, it is possible to peer into the pure essence of individual freedom, which we have included in the broader concept of vital energy.
A healthy brain displays extreme plasticity, allowing it to constantly open new circuits, reactivate dormant ones and create entirely new contacts according to an order (or, more precisely a "non-order") that is determined by the fortuitous nature of external events.
Mental illness, by contrast, imposes a stifling rigidity on the brain, crystallizing it. This is why a mentally-ill brain appears to be simpler and more orderly, producing behavior patterns that are much more predictable. The pathological behaviors associated with this sphere are characterized by repetition and iteration; the most common feature of madness is its very methodical nature. The antithesis to this sterile rigidity lies in the highly dynamic creativity of Chaos, whose richly meandering bosom proves to be the perfect environment for generating and nourishing the seed of freedom.
The business community and institutions are only now beginning to seriously deal with these issues which in the next few years will bring about nothing short of a revolution in values and professional behavior.
» Chaos & Vital Energy by Carlo Ricciardi, July 1998
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