“Ordered Chaos”-does this sound familiar?
Fractals as patterns of complex systems
The term “ordered chaos” succinctly spells out the essence of chaos theory as well as fractal patterns. A definition of chaos theory is “the qualitative study of unstable aperiodic behavior in deterministic nonlinear dynamical systems.” Before chaos theory we all equate deterministic behavior with predictability. However what chaos theory shows is that this is not the case. A system can be deterministic and at the same time unpredictable because its behavior is aperiodic and unstable. And fractal patterns demonstrates to us visually and hence in real life how simple the mathematical equations for a deterministic system can be before its behavior is no longer predicable even with the use of the most advanced computers.
Consciousness out of Chaos?
I think consciousness can be defined in two ways. The first is the subject that is able to experience the world, both the outer physical world as well as the inner mental and emotional world. The second is a collection of the various inner emotions and thoughts of a physical person. And for the vast majority of people through these various inner emotions and thoughts emerges an illusion of an unified individual ego or an “I”.
As the subject that is able to experience the world consciousness is qualitatively different from the experienced world. It has no shape, weight, size, texture, location and so on that we normally associate an physical object with. It also has none of the qualities of our emotions and thoughts. To the extent that chaos is part of our objective world, either outer or inner, it is not part of our consciousness which is the subject that is able to experience this chaos. In short consciousness and chaos are two necessary and yet different parts of our experience and no part can arise from the other.
Only as an illusion of an unified individual ego or an “I” we can say that consciousness comes out of chaos. It is only through experiencing the world in its various aspects, both outer and inner, that we can experience the ego or an I. In this sense “I” is nothing but the collection of experience and nothing more. The fact that we feel that there is an “I” as an individual object above and beyond the collection of experience is a very fundamental illusion that Buddhism tries to dispel. In short the “consciousness” that comes out of chaos is only an illusion of an “I” or individual ego which does not exist.
No comments:
Post a Comment