Ordered Chaos, Fractals, and Consciousness

Ordered Chaos

According to one of our class handouts this past week, “chaos theory is the qualitative study of unstable aperiodic behavior in deterministic nonlinear dynamical systems.” Order, meanwhile, is a framework that humans use to describe the vast universe and everything in it in some kind of way that we can make sense of, focusing on patterns and repetition.

The term “ordered chaos” makes me think of nothing so much as when my friend Bonnie had a baby five years ago. Bonnie is the daughter of a lawyer, and she is the banker, scheduler, and CEO of her homestead. She tracks to the hundredth of a mile the distance that she runs each week. She’s the consummate project manager of this project called life, and the very picture of Order.

Newborns are not known for their orderliness, and while her daughter was no exception, Bonnie immediately brought her special brand of order to motherhood. She kept a clipboard on the small table beside her baby's bassinette, noting the exact times and details of every neonatal poop, and she kept a strict feeding schedule, similarly tracked. Her friends still speak in hushed reverence of The Clipboard. I don’t believe this data was put to any ultimate use once documented, but I think the process provided at least a facade of order in a time of life that is mostly a shitshow of chaos, giving Bonnie the sense of control she thrives on. In this sense, perhaps order is a masquerade in a chaotic universe, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t useful.

Fractals as Patterns of Complex Systems

Fractals are a kind of pattern that can be found throughout nature. Here’s a definition from Cosmos Magazine that helped pin the concept down a bit more for me:

Fractals are objects in which the same patterns occur again and again at different scales and sizes. In a perfect mathematical fractal – such as the famous Mandelbrot set… -- this “self-similarity” goes infinitely deep: each pattern is made up of smaller copies of itself, and those smaller copies are made up of smaller copies again, forever.

Nature can be incredibly—even infinitely!—complex while exhibiting this fractal nature, which can actually be described somewhat succinctly. There is some stunning photography in this article of fractals as seen in leaves, snowflakes, and my favorite, Romanesco.

Consciousness Out of Chaos?

In doing a little online research while thinking about the relationship between consciousness and chaos, I found this terrific definition of consciousness from a New Ideas in Psychology journal article abstract:

Consciousness is described as a natural evolutionary space-time template of continuously generated self-referential energy patterns (algorithms). The energetic evolution of mind is described as a natural self-referential exteriorization of the algorithmic organization of consciousness in the form of culturally shared mental models.

“Continuously generated self-referential energy patterns” is a way of thinking of consciousness that I can apply the notion to myself, my cats, the peach tree in my backyard, the ethereal soul of a loved one no longer in his body, the local ecosystems where I hike and camp, human culture, and the Earth itself.

If consciousness itself is continuously evolving, then we can see it as both a driving force behind and a result of the ongoing dynamic balance between autopoiesis and entropy (i.e., the tendency toward chaos).