The Secrets of Hidden Knowledge: How Understanding Things in the Physical Realm Nurtures Life

THE SECRETS

of

HIDDEN KNOWLEDGE

How Understanding Things In The Physical Realm Nurtures Life

Ayub V. O. Ofulla, PhD

Copyright © 2013 Ayub V. O. Ofulla.

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ISBN: 978-1-4582-0931-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4582-0930-6 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013908345

Abbott Press rev. date: 07/31/2013

Contents

Foreword

Acknowledgements

Prologue      The Unifying Physical Reflections

Chapter One       Chaos-Order Relationships and the Ancient Concepts of Continuous Creations

Chapter Two       Esoteric Knowledge of Our World in the Cosmic Perspective

Chapter Three       Universal Applicability of Biological Principles and Knowledge

Chapter Four       Research and Projects Can Create Rapid Growth and Development

Chapter Five       Rules and Standardization Can Lead to Organizational Order and Growth

Chapter Six       Uncontrolled Chaos Leads to Failure and Downfall

Bibliography and Notes

Foreword

By Professor Omolo Ongati

Chaos-order relationships underlie the hidden knowledge. Chaos-order processes are constantly at play in the physical universe, in nature, in life and even in living as well explained and illustrated in various chapters and essays in this book. The book is grounded on physical, biological and social sciences with a lot of information from ancient writings and the scriptures all designed to help us understand and maintain our lives in the best progressive forms. The book attempts to help us know how to maintain order in our lives and how to avoid or tackle situations which are chaotic and act as stumbling blocks in life. Such situations can even destroy and kill us if we are not aware of them and how to avoid or deal with them. The book will help us to embrace unavoidable chaotic situations and even use them for innovative survival and faster progress.

This book will help you to understand clearly how the basic nature of the physical universe is part and parcel of your life; to understand the part of nature your life occupies and how it shapes your life and your progress or failure in the world. This will enable you to know how to successfully live and change your attitudes so as to live a peaceful, harmonious and progressive life. It will also teach you the importance of research, the importance of sometimes obeying strict rules and the importance of having standards for life and work. In this book, the author has vividly attempted to present the basic physics of life—one’s life as it relates to molecular physical realities of various aspects of life itself or social life as it relates to the individual.

Each chapter in this book is rich in materials and values which will stretch and challenge every reader’s attitude towards existence, living and probably help them solve some of the problems of humanity.

Chapter One of this book is Chaos-Order Relationships and the Ancient Concepts of Continuous Creations. Here, we see how chaos-order relationships in complex systems can help us understand the seeming mysteries in our physical universe, in our world and in our lives. Though as human beings, we tend to abhor chaos and try to avoid it as much as possible, nature uses chaos in remarkable ways to create new entities, shape events and hold the universe together in a continuous emergent state of order. Nature is inherently chaotic but constantly strives to create and maintain orderly systems in a fight which is seemingly endless but must be understood, respected, and managed by the enlightened. Conquering chaos, or what most religions probably call satanic or evil forces, is the most central occupation of the progressive humankind. The philosophies of Nun and Maat can help us illuminate how the ancient Egyptians understood and managed their daily affairs by drawing from these everlasting states of cosmic events.

Chapter Two is Esoteric Knowledge of Our World in the Cosmic Perspective. In this Chapter, we look at some ways in which esoterism when used well can make us gain new knowledge, which many people, however wise and intelligent, may not be aware of and therefore cannot appreciate. For example the bible, and specifically the Gospels, are the only common sources of information to the public that states, in a hidden esoteric form, that only the fit will survive and the unfit will perish or be cut off because they do not bear fruit. This is natural selection in a hidden but extremely bold form but not necessarily used in the sense of the once discriminative social Darwinism campaigns of the yester years. Many people read these verses, but unfortunately, come up with their own comfortable meanings and interpretations. We can use esoteric knowledge to prosper in our lives, and to know how to avoid or embrace chaos and attain order and progress which is the chief aim of most religious scriptures.

Universal Applicability of Biological Principles and Knowledge is the title of Chapter Three. This Chapter explains and gives examples of how biological knowledge can help us understand most of the hidden aspects of life. This is because we are biological beings and evolutionary processes are behind most complex universal creations. In this chapter, a new term and probably theory biologism is introduced and explained as to how it can help us understand our social organization and economic growth. Biologism can help us understand ourselves as living and evolving organisms or holistic beings out of chaotic materials and forces. It explains how the organizational and hierarchical systems—from cells, tissues, organs, to individual beings, families, communities, ecosystems, societies, companies and even governments and world states exists in an evolving continuum which has seen us come this far as modern humans.

Chapter Four shows how Research and Projects Can Create Rapid Growth and Development. The chapter presents research as a hidden method which nature has always used in sort of evolutionary way to nurture growth and development of its complex systems; and humans uses it to advance different aspects of their lives, their technologies, and their socio-economic status. Research is a tool which when deliberately employed consciously and appropriately can make us rapidly succeed in life, as it has already helped us achieve tremendous technological and social advancement through projects and programs.

In Chapter Five, we see how Rules and Standardization Can Lead to Organizational Order and Growth; we learn that adhering to strict rules, laws and standards, akin to religious codes and the operations of our innately acquired instincts which are easily seen in the behavior of lower animals, is imperative for the maintenance of organizational order and growth and can help us prosper in our businesses and institutional systems. It also has potential to help us control the chaos, confusions, and suffering rampant in our individual lives, families, corporate systems or work places, not to mention conflicts and wars. It is an open secret that law and order leads to organization and progress and gets innately chaotic people out of anarchy. The world history can testify to this fact.

In Chapter Six, Uncontrolled Chaos Leads to Failure and Downfall; it is explained how in-built in ourselves and systems, with now the clear understanding of the universal presence of chaos and its constant interplay with orderly creations, is a failure syndrome which must always be guarded against to avoid downfall. This chapter will help us understand how to apply the hidden knowledge in order to avoid or control chaos which can lead to our failure and downfall. It is quite clear that uncontrolled chaos by default will lead to failure and downfall—that chaos or disorder is more natural and an easier path than order; that to build is more difficult and takes more mental and physical effort and time, than to destroy.

It is my sincere hope that this book will help provoke and challenge you so that you begin thinking of how to strive and make progress in life, in order to live comfortably and fruitfully.

Our real discoveries come from chaos, from going to the place that looks wrong and stupid and foolish.

—Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

Acknowledgements

This book has taken a good amount of time to write; it has been a long time in the making. I started writing this book in 1980s. It has emerged from my personal life experiences, information obtained from different literature sources including physical, biological and social sciences, observations, talks and interviews with different personalities and my notes of daily occurrences within and outside my academic life.

I am deeply grateful to Mr Onyango Ajus for helping with research and theological insights, Mangoa Mosota and Visendi Lumuamu for editing the publication; Prof Vassey Mwanja, Prof Phillip Okinda, Prof Bethwell Ogot, Prof William Ochieng’, Prof Shem Wandiga, Prof Eric Odada, Prof Lucas Odhuon, Prof John Ogonji, Dr John Vulule, Dr Kiprotich Chelimo, Mr Oliver Achila, Mr Owen McOnyango, Mr Nick Ogolla, Mr Benard Adoyo, Mr Sammy Ndire, Mr Richard Orengo and Dr Paul Abuom for stimulating conversations and also encouragement; Mr Douglas Anyona for assisting with the many printouts of the earlier drafts; Prof Jacob Midiwo for advising me some years back to look at entropy; and Dr Carrey Francis Onyango for reviews and appreciating the philosophical aspects of this book. I would also like to thank my family for a life time of love and support.

I sincerely thank Dr Victor McGill, Walter L. Bradley and Randy A. Brown for readily accepting that I can use their materials from the internet. Last but not least, I wish to record my profound gratitude to Abbott Press for finally putting this book in print. Without your help, this book would not exist.

DEDICATION

To my mother, Julia Were Ofulla

Prologue

The Unifying Physical Reflections

There is no mystery in the physical nature of our lives and activities; living beings are as simple as they physically appear and operate even though in their formations and operations, there are complex systems often hidden from our eyes and knowledge.

The basic realities in the world we live in are physical: they occur in physical space or are part of spatial activities. They basically obey or can be traced back to the fundamental laws of physical interactions. Our physical movements such as walking or manoeuvring our hands are fuelled by the chemical energy we derive from the foods we eat and the air we breathe. Even our thoughts are due to the physical or chemical activities of our nervous systems deriving information from our sensory organs.

Our bodies are made up of structures and processes, which co-exist to make up a functional being. Achievements we make in life are through physical activities or processes with which we get involved in. Work itself is a physical process. It involves doing or manipulating physical structures. Physical processes can build up complex physical structures such as living systems and human beings through the process of evolution, and the new sciences of chaos and complexity, and understanding of emergence and entropy or second law of thermodynamics can now explain how these seemingly mysterious processes occur.

Living systems are clearly able to achieve a local reduction in their entropy as they grow and develop; they create structures of greater internal energy (for instance, they lower entropy) out of the nutrients they absorb. In other words, they create order, and they self-organize. This does not represent a violation of the second law of thermodynamics because a living organism does not constitute a closed system.

Self-organization creates dissipative systems. A dissipative system is one that maintains an ongoing shape or identity because a flow of energy through the system is maintained. The energy is used to keep the organism alive and maintain the boundary between itself and the outside world. Our human body is a dissipative system because it is maintained by a number of energy flows, such as food, water, air, and even environmental stimuli and cognitive processes.

Living systems are examples of complex adaptive systems. They exist within a wider environment interacting with it in complex ways. Complex adaptive systems are such that they can improve their fitness in their environment by learning. As their environment changes, they adapt by taking new forms, and acquiring new knowledge and skills as can be clearly seen in the case of higher beings like humans that work better. Often this means competing in an environment with other systems, each trying to improve to gain a larger share of the resources available in that environment. This is where complexity links to evolution and the concept of natural selection.

As a physical being, living in the space you occupy at every moment of time you should not try to look at your space and time as different from you. This may not be conventional to you, but it may be the basic reality. You should look at time as the duration of events, be they your own living processes or other external events. Some events can take shorter periods while others will take longer ones. As with time, some clocks may be faulty and not synchronized with the world time and thus work faster or slower, giving the impression that the timed events we undertake either last longer or shorter. But all these could just be a matter of conventions.

Our ignorance of life and the universe in general may make us ascribe mysteries in our lives or ourselves. The only difference is that life is very delicate to adverse physical changes. Because of this, there has to be knowledge and safeguards to keep it right and in orderly physical condition. We rarely think that in physical terms, we are just as ordinary as a piece of rock lying by the roadside. If we are hit hard, we will be crushed and injured; if we are rained on we will be wet, and if we are pressed hard we will be depressed. We are just as vulnerable to physical effects as any other material in the universe. If we take poison, it will affect us chemically, and we will feel sick or even die. If we take food, it will also affect us chemically, be nourished, feel satisfied and keep on living. If we take a lot of alcohol or other intoxicants, it will affect us chemically and we will get drunk, chaotic in mind, confused, behave less optimally and be unproductive. It can even make us stagger and cause us to fall.

Even society, like Camille Paglia puts it in her book titled Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickson, is an artificial human construction, a defense against nature. Human society in both its primitive and advanced forms is based on systems of inherited knowledge. Paradoxically, much that is called human knowledge is nothing but a mish-mash of truth and untruth. One dominant untruth is the notion, central to Judeo-Christian theology, that human beings occupy a privileged position in nature. However, the truth is that we are not nature’s favorites. We are, like Paglia aptly puts it, ‘but one of the multitude of species upon which nature indiscriminately exerts its force.’ Fire, flood, hurricane, volcano, earthquakes, like history attest, are forces that can reduce even the most advanced society to ruins in a matter of minutes.

Therefore in most cases for well formed and healthy beings, it is our environment and what we allow into our systems knowingly or unknowingly that affects us. We are open systems. It is important to avoid getting too much into chaotic environments and situations. It is paramount to embrace order, growth and progress in our living moments and in our interactions with other people or systems and our environments.

If we are such delicate beings, why then do we manage to survive for long in this world and physical universe? Is it because we are lucky? Or is it because dangerous situations are always rare? It is a fact that our survival depends on our knowledge, skills, adaptability and experience. As human beings, we are born, grow up and find ourselves in a world with either food or no food to eat, shelter or no shelter to protect us. It is through being nurtured and learning that we know what is or has been hidden from our immediate vision, senses and previous experiences. This is because actual physical processes in things are often hidden and it takes time to learn them and even to acquire appropriate skills. Most times science and technology can enable us know what they are and how to use them and even develop further from them.

Nobody is born with all the knowledge, experience and skills. It has all to be acquired and scaled up, and this takes effort and training—and some form of persistence and endurance. If we are to achieve success in whatever we want to do in life, then we have to know how things are done and how to do them well. Structures or materials are often available and most of us have energy, intellect and abilities to do things, more so if compelled by the survival instinct.

If it is success in life you are presently aiming at, then you can be successful. If it is the money and wealth you want, then you can acquire all that. But it will all depend on the physical processes or the activities you carry out towards your goal. A concise plan, specific activities or processes, consistent effort, energy and drive have to be in place so that the process is not slackened or neglected.

Your current activities can affect your future success or even determine your failure and downfall. For instance, today’s wasted living moments or involvement in bad activities can lead to future failure and downfall and even death. Therefore, going back in personal time means sequentially tracing back your past activities and history. This is how you can discover how the past specific mistakes in life led to the present failure.

Therefore, you must have knowledge and skills to enable you live well today for a better tomorrow. If you look at your life in this basic physical way, then you will find it easier to focus only on important things which can better your life. It is apparent that most failure usually results from arrested evolution, or making the wrong choices from a multitude of events and options.

Our failure is most often failure of our mental and physical strength. It is as if our bodies cannot harness and have enough strength to make us think and do right, accomplish all our desired tasks and have perpetual or sustained progress. In most cases and in most people, the brain has unlimited strength of thought, but the body seemingly has no strength. We routinely need chemical and physical support to energize our bodies to work; we need physical exercise or exertion and chemicals to keep us strong, alert, excited, well nourished, and awake to enable us perform our duties and live progressive lives. In most cases for us humans, this has to be mixed up with some spiritualism for lasting progress and success to be attained.

In many situations, do not be blinded by following other people’s ways. Every person has his or her own space and time sequences. Other peoples’ space and time sequences may not be synchronized with your own space and time sequences and frame of activities. People do things differently. So largely follow your own path. Do things where and when you want them done—that is if you have the choices, and you normally have the choices if you plan earlier enough and strategically put resources (including knowledge and skills) in place. Excuse yourself from other peoples’ activities which may interfere with your own cycle of priority events. Follow your own path, but merge or collaborate with others if it will enhance or help your own activities and help all of you progress faster and easily. Positive teamwork works and networks are the keys to growth of strong systems.

The fallacy we often have is that we want to always feel the same feelings, to repeat the experiences we like and are comfortable with. Though physiologically appealing, it is often impossible. Our memories can traverse different spaces and times in the past and in the future, but our physiological feelings may be strictly for the particular moment, and there is no guarantee that it will be similarly repeated again in exactly the same way. So do not let this common human perspective and often flirting physiological habit of living worry or confuse and interfere with your strategies.

Once you get deeply involved in doing one thing, you will acquire the special feelings for that specific activity at that moment and the feelings of doing other things may be forgotten depending on the level of your consciousness and commitment to the current activity. If feelings differ with our states of idleness or activities, then do we have to simply relax or do one unimportant thing, which we currently feel like doing instead of a more rigorous physical engagement doing another more important and urgent priority thing in our life? We should always see each moment as a new moment, with new challenges, which may require new tactics and levels of physical engagement.

We should always be in control, always looking forward and determining what to do next. For if we lose guard, even for a brief moment, then our often chaotic natures and events will take charge and spiral us to the path of failure and downfall. It is now common knowledge or idea, among those who are in the know; that a system cannot spontaneously become better ordered or organized but can readily become more disordered, even if isolated from destructive external influences. This knowledge or idea apeal to our daily experience of life and systems of administrations and governments or even economic activities, and confers plausibility on the law of increase of entropy. As far as it goes, there is much truth in this view of things—systems will disintegrate if not attended to or nurtured.

Life is mostly caught in the tension of order and chaos. If there is too much order, everything becomes monotonous and the same, giving no room for creativity and new innovations. But on the other hand, if there is too much chaos nothing can be predicted from one moment to the next, with nothing lasting long enough to be effective. Between these states, complexity reveals the ‘edge of chaos’; the point where there is enough chaos for novelty and creativity but also enough order for consistency and patterns to emerge and be maintained. In business, this is a magic point where innovation is at its highest and unimaginable properties can emerge. At the edge of chaos self organization and emergence can appear.

Running an organization can sometimes be hectic and chaotic. However, managers have acted on the basis that organizational events can always be controlled. However, chaos theory recognizes that events indeed are rarely controlled.

Many chaos theorists (as do systems theorists) refer to biological systems when explaining their theory. At the beginning, individuals can come together to form functional groups and even institutions or governments. Through natural life processes and development or growth, cells can come together to form tissues; tissues forming organs and organ systems and then aha, a holistic or wholistic functional and even self aware and conscious living organism, such as me and you, will emerge.

Chaos theorists have come to know that as systems naturally go to more complexity—as you grow and learn or know more and have more relationships and activities some good and others bad, as companies and even institutions grow bigger and acquire or adopt more activities, processes internal sub-systems and structures, as countries increase in populations with more institutions and structures—as they do so, these systems will become more volatile or chaotic in behavior and susceptible to cataclysmic events and must expend more energy and resources to maintain that complexity. As they expend more energy and resources, they seek and establish more structure to maintain stability. This trend continues until the system splits and combines with another complex system—such as individuals and even systems at different hierarchical levels establishing friendships, marriages, mergers, partnerships, bigger companies or corporations, form unions or federations of different counties or countries—or falls apart entirely if they do not act in time or never understood what is going to hit them as most often happens. This trend is what many see as the trend in life, in organizations and the world in general. It explains how chaos spontaneously arises in complex systems which fails to control themselves, as naturally happens, and as is also explained by second law of thermodynamics and entropy.

In our spiritual lives, chaos theory offers striking parallels—chaos is the last state a system goes through before it dissolves into completely random behavior that represents the demise of the system. But in a mathematically chaotic system, there is underlying order as scientists now know. You can observe the order inherent in a chaotic system—but only when you step back and view its wild permutations over time and from a multi-dimensional view. From chaos can emerge a reformed system that is stable and stronger than the previous one; there is therefore a life lesson in the behavior of chaotic systems. For example, there are phases in human life in which chaos seems to rein supreme, typically caused by illness, crisis, financial devastation, death of a loved one, or a dark night of the soul or depression.

Now that we have seen how chaotic systems develop, it is easier for us to understand how our realities are seemingly divided in space and time that unless we make an effort to mentally connect them using our memory and thinking, we will find ourselves living divided and uncoordinated lives by default. To our basic physical being, every moment seems to be a separate moment—which is actually the truth because we are largely made up of distinct but interacting parts or sub-systems. Our body system, mostly the brain and the mind, has to come in and connect things so that they can be seen and experienced together in a holistic way. Thus, our intelligence as human beings relies on our capacity and abilities to connect and integrate, and even project upon realities that occur at different times and spaces and in most cases only in imaginations and dreams. In this way we can even create new realities mentally, and later test their practicality in the real physical world. This is where research methodologies come in handy.

The most important thing for survival is positioning. You must avoid dangerous places and positions. You must seek safe and beneficial places and situations. It will make all the difference to you. If your job in a particular place is not giving you much, then move on to a more beneficial place. You should not have any inhibitions about shifting yourself from position to position, or from doing one thing to doing another thing, or even from one marriage to another. Success breeds success and being in a successful place will most often make you successful if you are also hard working and cooperative. So go to the successful places and join the successful people. But do not do that in order to exploit. Join others in order to help in enhancing their success and in turn your success as well. Wherever you go, work and help yourself and also help others; do not go to do nothing and get more or just to be a baggage and burden as often happens in most of our human systems.

The truth in this world is that people lead isolated lives in separate spaces, or time, and yet they derive benefits from one another. There is no way a leader, a boss, a guardian, a parent, spouse or even your child will understand you if he or she does not talk or communicate with you; feel with you and even sometimes suffer with you. The power and purpose of connectedness and cooperation should be embraced always so as to enable us prosper. This calls for open and effective communication.

The problem is that we tend to think of ourselves as psychological and social beings with only psychological and social problems to solve. We rarely look beyond the psychological and social problems and find or perceive their physical causes, meanings and realities. That is why we never see the importance of generating or conserving and putting to good use the drives, energy, time and space we have. Most of us have a lot of energy and drive which make us naturally want to do things. But the problem is often that we end up doing the wrong things guided by our faulty psychological and social systems and conceptions. We end up wasting our time and energy and even other physical resources and property. Regarding this, Marcus Aurelius once said:

If you do the task before you, always adhering to it strictly with zeal and energy and yet with humility disregarding all lesser ends and keeping the divinity within you pure and upright, as though you were, even now faced with its recall—if you hold steadily to this, staying for nothing and shrinking from nothing, only seeking in each passing action a conformity with nature and in each word and utterance a fearless truthfulness, then shall the good life be yours. And from this course no man has the power to hold you back.

It is all upon you to choose to do one thing or the other. You can choose to work wisely and better your life or choose to laze around and stay poor and suffer emotionally and physically. It is important to have good standards or even strict rules and protocols to live by. But all the same you will stay alive somehow as many of us find ourselves aimlessly drifting along in life and being perpetual burdens to systems which support us. Even if you die, it may not matter, unless you have people who totally depend on you. There is some basic similarity in everything physical. All people are just active structures as we have already seen. Whether you are living a comfortable or a difficult life does not matter to the total universe. Other people will still exist; some will even be happier. The universe will still be there in one form or another. It will only matter to you and to people who depend on you. So it is upon you to determine the course of your life and destiny. For life is mostly a series of problem solving activities and adaptation.

There is actually no ideal way of spending living hours. Basically, whatever you do is physically okay, so long as it is totally okay with you. Fundamentally, there is nothing like right and wrong, so long as you do not break the rules, laws and standards; so long as you do not suffer, your society does not suffer, and the world does not suffer. So long as you do not inconvenience or waste yourself, your neighbors, your community or society, and your physical environment. Whatever you do is physically fine.

At the beginning and at the end, there is chaos and order, and somehow we have to live at the edge of chaos to see light and progress at the end of the long day.

It does not matter!!! And yet it matters!!!

Tiny details imperceptible to us decide everything!

―W. G. Sebald, Vertigo

Chapter One

Chaos-Order Relationships and the Ancient Concepts of Continuous Creations

Without order there is chaos and the human mind is not spared either

—Ayub Ofulla

Chaos Theory

In an article on Chaos theory according to Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, assessed on the 19th of March, 2012, chaos theory is a field of study in mathematics, with applications in several disciplines including physics, engineering, economics, biology, and philosophy. Chaos theory studies the behavior of dynamical systems that are highly sensitive to initial conditions, an effect which is popularly referred to as the butterfly effect.

Chaotic behavior can be observed in many natural systems, such as weather. Explanation of such behavior may be sought through analysis of a chaotic mathematical model, or through analytical techniques such as recurrence plots and Poincaré maps.

Chaos theory is applied in many scientific disciplines, including: geology, mathematics, microbiology, biology, computer science, economics, engineering, finance, meteorology, philosophy, physics, politics, population dynamics, psychology, and robotics.

Chaotic behavior has been observed in the laboratory in a variety of systems, including electrical circuits, lasers, oscillating chemical reactions, fluid dynamics, and mechanical and magneto-mechanical devices, as well as computer models of chaotic processes.

Observations of chaotic behavior in nature include changes in weather, the dynamics of satellites in the solar system, the time evolution of the magnetic field of celestial bodies, population growth in ecology, the dynamics of the action potentials in neurons, and molecular vibrations. Chaos theory is currently being applied to medical studies of epilepsy, specifically to the prediction of seemingly random seizures by observing initial conditions.

Quantum chaos theory studies how the correspondence between quantum mechanics and classical mechanics works in the context of chaotic systems. Relativistic chaos describes chaotic systems under general relativity. The motion of a system of three or more stars interacting gravitationally (the gravitational N-body problem) is generally chaotic. In electrical engineering, chaotic systems are used in communications, random number generators, and encryption systems.

Chaos theory looks at how very simple things can generate very complex outcomes that could not be predicted by just looking at the parts by themselves. You may have noticed the wonderful swirling patterns of birds flying together in the sky or fish schooling in the oceans. At first glance we would think the birds would have to be rather intelligent to work out how to fly in formation like that. We would probably also assume there must be a ‘bird in charge’ giving instructions to the others in the pattern.

Research into swarms has shown, however, that all that is required is for each bird to maintain the distance between itself and its neighbors and fly in the average direction of its neighbors. From this alone the wonderful, swirling, complex patterns the birds or fish make are seen. Simple rules can generate complex behaviors that just seem to emerge out of nowhere. While each individual agent does not need much intelligence, there is swarm intelligence which resides with the collective.

Small differences in initial conditions (such as those due to rounding errors in numerical computation) yield widely diverging outcomes for chaotic systems, rendering long-term prediction impossible in general. This happens even though these systems are deterministic, meaning that their future behavior is fully determined by their initial conditions, with no random elements involved. In other words, the deterministic nature of these systems does not make them predictable. This behavior is known as deterministic chaos.

In common usage, chaos means a state of disorder. However, in chaos theory, the term is defined more precisely. Although there is no universally accepted mathematical definition of chaos, a commonly used definition says that, for a dynamical system to be classified as chaotic, it must have the following properties: It must be sensitive to initial conditions; it must be topologically mixing; and its periodic orbits must be dense.

The requirement for sensitive dependence on initial conditions implies that there is a set of initial conditions of positive measure which do not converge to a cycle of any length. Sensitivity to initial conditions means that each point in such a system is arbitrarily closely approximated by other points with significantly different future trajectories. Thus, an arbitrarily small perturbation of the current trajectory may lead to significantly different future behavior.

Topological mixing (or topological transitivity) means that the system will evolve over time so that any given region or open set of its phase space will eventually overlap with any other given region. This mathematical concept of mixing corresponds to the standard intuition, and the mixing of colored dyes or fluids is an example of a chaotic system.

Topological mixing is often omitted from popular accounts of chaos, which equate chaos with sensitivity to initial conditions. However, sensitive dependence on initial conditions alone does not give chaos. For example, consider the simple dynamical system produced by repeatedly doubling an initial value. This system has sensitive dependence on initial conditions everywhere, since any pair of nearby points will eventually become widely separated. However, this example has no topological mixing, and therefore has no chaos. Indeed, it has extremely simple behavior: all points except zero tend to infinity.

However, it has been shown that the last two properties in the list above actually imply sensitivity to initial conditions and if attention is restricted to intervals, the second property implies the other two (an alternative, and in general weaker, definition of chaos uses only the first two properties in the above list). It is interesting that the most practically significant condition, that of sensitivity to initial conditions, is actually redundant in the definition, being implied by two (or for intervals, one) purely topological conditions, which are therefore of greater interest to mathematicians.

The first true experiment in chaos was by a meteorologist, Edward Lorenz. In 1960, Lorenz was working on the problem of weather prediction. He had a computer set up, with a set of twelve equations to model the weather. It did not predict the weather itself. However, this computer program did theoretically predict what the weather might be.

One day, when he was rushed for time, he set the computer to round off the numbers to be calculated so a result would be found sooner. He was expecting that the rounding off would have little or no effect on the final results. However, surprisingly, what he found was that the final results were dramatically different. He found that small changes in the state of a system can cause major changes in the final output (sensitivity to initial conditions).

People had been used to thinking that large changes need large forces. Lorenz found that small forces could have large effects. This has become known as the butterfly effect. It has been said (although it is an exaggeration) that a butterfly flapping its wings in Hong Kong could cause a tornado in Texas. The picture above is the mathematical depiction of the attractor he found investigating the weather and is known as the butterfly attractor.

If small changes in the initial state of a complex system can drastically alter the final outcome, then long-term weather prediction is impossible as there is no way to perfectly measure and describe the weather at any one point in time. There is always a further level of accuracy to be measured.

Just a small change in the initial conditions can drastically change the long-term behavior of a system. Such a small amount of difference in a measurement might be considered experimental noise, background noise, or an inaccuracy of the equipment.

Such things are impossible to avoid in even the most isolated laboratory. With a starting number of two, the final result can be entirely different from the same system with a starting value of 2.000001. It is simply impossible to achieve this level of accuracy—just try and measure something to the nearest millionth of an inch!

From this idea, Lorenz stated that it is impossible to predict the weather accurately. However, this discovery led him on to other aspects of what eventually came to be known as chaos theory.

Sensitivity to initial conditions is popularly known as the butterfly effect, so called because of the title of a paper given by Edward Lorenz in 1972 to the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, D.C. entitled Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly’s Wings in Brazil set off a Tornado in Texas?

The flapping wing represents a small change in the initial condition of the system, which causes a chain of events leading to large-scale phenomena. Had the butterfly not flapped its wings, the trajectory of the system might have been vastly different.

Sensitivity to initial conditions refers to the high level of importance of primary conditions from which the future path and direction of a system stems. This concept of sensitivity to initial conditions can also be referred to as bifurcation.

While the Butterfly Effect, is an entertaining notion, sensitivity to initial conditions remains in reality a very abstract concept without the presence of bifurcation, which is mathematically labeled as the actual splitting point of two near-identical entities which, due to the sensitivity of initial conditions, tend to take two very distinct paths and result in two totally different geographically or even evolutionary places.

In the early 1970s, Robert May was working on how insect birthrates varied according to levels of food supply and came up with results similar to those of Lorenz. He found that at critical values, the system took twice as long to settle back into a stable pattern. After several period doubling cycles, the system became unpredictable. Period doubling proved to be an important concept in many branches of complexity.

In 1971, David Ruelle and Floris Takens discovered strange attractors (also known as chaotic attractors). They mapped these mathematically onto a phase space, where each dimension corresponds to a variable of the system. This enabled accurate mapping of a system and its dynamics.

Equilibrium is the state of death, only chaos produces life. The Ancient Greeks have been driven to extinction by too much search for architectural harmony.

― Stéphane Lupasco, Le Principe D’antagonisme

Et La Logique De L’é Nergie

Complexity

As written in Victor McGill’s website (www.vmacgil.net—request for permission to use materials from the website granted by Victor McGill on the 10th of March, 2013), Stephen Hawking has said that the science of this 21st century will be the science of complexity. When science has achieved so much, what could it be that could take us all on yet another enormous leap forward?

Science generally uses a system called reductionism to investigate our world. This means breaking down anything being examined into the parts that make it up. Reductionism proposes that if we understand the parts, we will understand how the whole system works. If you take a mechanical clock to pieces, you can see what each part does and find out how it works. Some things, however, cannot be investigated in this way.

There is much to be learned by dissecting a rat, for example, but in dissecting it, we kill it and cannot learn what gives it life.

Sometimes we need to stand back and look at the whole system to understand how things work, rather than break it into pieces. Chaos and complexity is a new science looking at our world in a holistic way.

Complexity Theory, and Chaos Theory which is a part of Complexity Theory, have taken off with the advent of the computer, since it can undertake the massive numbers of calculations required to investigate complex phenomena. It is a new area of science which some people have said could change our lives as much as Michael Faraday’s discovery of electricity and its properties.

Complexity refers to the condition of the universe which is integrated and yet too rich and varied for us to understand in simple common mechanistic or linear ways. We can understand many parts of the universe in these ways but the larger and more intricately related phenomena can only be understood by principles and patterns—not in detail. Complexity deals with the nature of emergence, innovation, learning and adaptation.

Complexity Theory looks at how complex systems can generate simple outcomes. Consider the billions of cells that make up a person and yet they all manage to work together in such a way that the body works as a single unit. Our body works to keep us alive. We get hungry when we need food; we get thirsty when we need water. We can think and learn and we have a distinct personality. Something happens when large numbers of individual units come together and interact intensely with each other. New levels of operating just emerge through what is called self-organization. By looking at a single human cell, you could not tell that it would be able to operate with other cells to form a human body.

A city also has a large number of intensely interacting units. This time human beings form the units. Once again, we would not know from examining a single human being that they would gather together in the millions to form cities. It is an emergent property, so that a city takes on a life or a personality of its own, which has self-organized out of the interactions of all the people who live in the city.

We cannot predict what a complex system will evolve into. When we think about it, all life from the smallest cell to the largest animals is complex adaptive systems and life always provides us with a mystery.

Complexity is a scientific theory which asserts that some systems display behavioral phenomena that are completely inexplicable by any conventional analysis of the systems’ constituent parts. These phenomena, commonly referred to as emergent behavior, seem to occur in many complex systems involving living organisms, such as a stock market or the human brain. For instance, complexity theorists see a stock market crash as an emergent response of a complex monetary system to the actions of myriad individual investors; human consciousness is seen as an emergent property of a complex network of neurons in the brain.

Precisely how to model such emergence—that is, to devise mathematical laws that will allow emergent behavior to be explained and even predicted—is a major problem that has yet to be solved by complexity theorists. The effort to establish a solid theoretical foundation has attracted mathematicians, physicists, biologists, economists, and others, making the study of complexity an exciting and evolving new scientific theory.

As stated in the Would-be Worlds (1997), by the American mathematician John L. Casti, complex systems are not new, but for the first time in history tools are available to study such systems in a controlled, repeatable, scientific fashion. Previously, the study of complex systems, such as an ecosystem, a national economy, or even a road-traffic network, was simply too expensive, too time-consuming, or too dangerous—in sum, too impractical—for tinkering with the system as a whole. Instead, only bits and pieces of such processes could be looked at in a laboratory or in some other controlled setting. But, with today’s computers, complete silicon surrogates of these systems can be built, and these would-be worlds can be manipulated in ways that would be unthinkable for their real-world counterparts.

In coming to terms with complexity as a systems concept, an inherent subjective component must first be acknowledged. When something is spoken of as being complex, everyday language is being used to express a subjective feeling or impression. Hence, the meaning of something depends not only on the language in which it is expressed (that is, the code), the medium of transmission, and the message but also on the context. In short, meaning is bound up with the whole process of communication and does not reside in just one or another aspect of it. As a result, the complexity of a political structure, an ecosystem, or an immune system cannot be regarded as simply a property of that system taken in isolation. Rather, whatever complexity such systems have is a joint property of the system and its interaction with other systems, most often an observer or controller.

The various properties associated with simple and complex systems are lack of predictability. Complex processes generate counterintuitive, seemingly causal behavior that is full of surprises. Lowering taxes and interest rates may unexpectedly lead to higher unemployment; low-cost housing projects frequently give rise to slums worse than those they replaced; and opening new freeways often results in unprecedented traffic jams and increased commuting times. Such unpredictable, seemingly capricious behavior is one of the defining features of complex systems.

Simple systems generally involve a small number of components, with self-interactions dominating the linkages between the variables, for instance connectedness. For example, primitive barter economies, in which only a small number of goods (food, tools, weapons, clothing) are traded, are simpler and easier to understand than the developed economies of industrialized nations.

In addition to having only a few variables, simple systems generally consist of very few feedback loops; that enable the system to restructure, or at least modify, the interaction pattern between its variables, thereby opening up the possibility for a wider range of behaviors.

In simple systems control is generally concentrated in one, or at most a few, locations. Political dictatorships, privately owned corporations, and the original American telephone system are good examples of centralized systems with very little interaction, if any, between the lines of command. Moreover, the effects of the central authority’s decisions are clearly traceable.

By way of contrast, complex systems exhibit a diffusion of real authority. Complex systems may seem to have a central control, but in actuality the power is spread over a decentralized structure; a number of units combine to generate the actual system behavior. Typical examples of decentralized systems include democratic governments, universities, and the Internet. Complex systems tend to adapt more quickly to unexpected events because each component has more latitude for independent action.

Complex systems also tend to be more resilient because the proper functioning of each and every component is generally not critical. Resilience refers to the capability of a natural or human system to deal with disturbances without changing its basic structure and function, including transformation to a better state in some cases. This includes being able to self-organize and adapt to any long or short term stresses. In essence, how a system is able to adapt also hinges upon its resilience over a period of time. Resilience has more to do with ability to recover from an impact, to avoid this need by ensuring sound institutions and knowledge base, and also to withstand environmental and economic changes or downturn, conflict and other pressures.

Resilience of complex systems can explain why it is difficult for people to easily ‘die’ or perish even under the most trying conditions. Somehow, they will tend to ‘adapt’ and stay on, even recover from serious ailments or even devastating environmental conditions. The human soul is ‘tough’. However, this is more true for single unit living systems than for multiple unit non-living systems such as business corporations and even families and governments even though they can also be made up of living but loosely connected or associating ‘independent’ individuals. Marriages and business corporations can break up or be dissolved but the separated partners or associates will continue with their personal independent lives as individual entities.

Complex processes are irreducible. A complex system cannot be decomposed into isolated subsystems without suffering an irretrievable loss of the very information that makes it a system. Neglecting any part of the process or severing any of the connections linking its parts usually destroys essential aspects of the system’s behavior or structure.

The vast majority of counterintuitive behaviors shown by complex systems are attributable to some combination of the following five sources: paradox/self-reference, instability, incompatibility, connectivity, and emergence. With some justification, these sources of complexity can be thought of as surprise-generating mechanisms, whose quite different natures lead to their own characteristic type of surprise.

Everyday intuition has generally been honed on systems whose behavior is stable with regard to small disturbances, for the obvious reason that unstable systems tend not to survive long enough for reliable intuitions to develop about them. Nevertheless, the systems of both nature and humans often display pathologically sensitive behavior to small disturbances—as, for example, when stock markets crash in response to seemingly minor economic news about interest rates, corporate mergers, or bank failures. Such behaviors occur often enough that they deserve a starring role in this taxonomy of surprise.

What makes a system a system, and not simply a collection of elements, are the connections and interactions between its components, as well as the effect that these linkages have on its behavior. For example, it is the interrelationship between capital and labor that makes an economy; each component taken separately would not suffice. The two must interact for economic activity to take place, and complexity and surprise often reside in these connections.

A surprise-generating mechanism dependent on connectivity for its very existence is the phenomenon known as emergence, which refers to unexpected global system properties, not present in any of the individual subsystems that emerge from component interactions. A good example is water, whose distinguishing characteristics are its natural form as a liquid and its nonflammability—both of which are totally different than the properties of its component gases, hydrogen and oxygen.

Complexity Theory also gives many insights into social evolution. It may explain the underlying mechanisms by which lower level systems self-organize into higher emergent levels. An integration of the two systems would give a greater insight into the past as well as possible futures.

The difference between complexity arising from emergence and that coming only from connection patterns lies in the nature of the interactions between the various components of the system. For emergence, attention is not placed simply on whether there is some kind of interaction between the components but also on the specific nature of those interactions. For instance, connectivity alone would not enable one to distinguish between ordinary tap water, which involves an interaction between hydrogen and oxygen molecules, and heavy water (deuterium), which involves an interaction between the same components but with an extra neutron thrown into the mix. Emergence would make this distinction. In practice it is often difficult (and unnecessary) to differentiate between connectivity and emergence, and they are frequently treated as synonymous surprise-generating mechanisms.

An interesting example of emergence occurs in the global behavior of an ant colony. Like human societies, ant colonies achieve things that no individual member can accomplish. Nests are erected and maintained; chambers and tunnels are excavated; and territories are defended. Individual ants acting in accord with simple, local information carry on all of these activities; there is no master ant overseeing the entire colony and broadcasting instructions to the individual workers. Each individual ant processes the partial information available to it in order to decide which of the many possible functional roles it should play in the colony.

Recent work on harvester ants has shed considerable light on the processes by which members of an ant colony assume various roles. These studies identify four distinct tasks that an adult harvester ant worker can perform outside the nest: foraging, patrolling, nest maintenance, and midden work (building and sorting the colony’s refuse pile). It is primarily the interactions between ants performing these tasks that give rise to emergent phenomena in the ant colony.

When debris is piled near their nest opening, nest-maintenance workers abound. Apparently, the ants engage in task switching, by which the local decision of each individual ant determines much of the coordinated behavior of the entire colony. Task allocation depends on two kinds of decisions made by individual ants. First, there is the decision about which task to perform, followed by the decision of whether to be active in this task. As already noted, these decisions are based solely on local information; there is no centralized control keeping track of the big picture.

Once an ant becomes a forager it never switches to other tasks outside the nest. When a large cleaning chore arises on the surface of the nest, new nest-maintenance workers are recruited from ants working inside the nest, not from workers performing tasks on the outside. When there is a disturbance, such as an intrusion by foreign ants, nest-maintenance workers switch tasks to become patrollers. Finally, once an ant is allocated a task outside the nest, it never returns to chores on the inside.

The foregoing ant colony example shows how interactions between various types of ants can give rise to patterns of global work allocation in the colony, emergent patterns that cannot be predicted or that cannot even arise for isolated ants.

In times of widespread chaos and confusion, it has been the duty of more advanced human beings—artists, scientists, clowns and philosophers—to create order. In times such as ours, however, when there is too much order, too much management, too much programming and control, it becomes the duty of superior men and women to fling their favorite monkey wrenches into the machinery. To relive the repression of the human spirit, they must sow doubt and disruption.

—Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

Entropy, Disorder, and Second Law of Thermodynamics

The laws of thermodynamics make possible the characterization of a given sample of matter—after it has settled down to equilibrium with all parts at the same temperature—by ascribing numerical measures to a small number of properties (pressure, volume, energy, and so forth). One of these is entropy. As the temperature of the body is raised by adding heat, its entropy as well as its energy is increased. On the other hand, when a volume of gas enclosed in an insulated cylinder is compressed by pushing on the piston, the energy in the gas increases while the entropy stays the same or, usually, increases a little. In atomic terms, the total energy is the sum of all the kinetic and potential energies of the atoms, and the entropy, it is commonly asserted, is a measure of the disorderly state of the constituent atoms.

The heating of a crystalline solid until it melts and then vaporizes is a progress from a well-ordered, low-entropy state to a disordered, high-entropy state, and underlies the second law of thermodynamics. The idea that a system cannot spontaneously become better ordered but can readily become more disordered, even if left to itself, appeals to one’s experience of domestic economy and confers plausibility on the law of increase of entropy. As far as it goes, there is much truth in this naive view of things.

A physical system as big as the Earth, let alone the entire Galaxy—if set up in thermodynamic equilibrium and given unending time in which to evolve—might eventually have suffered such a huge fluctuation that the condition known today could have come about spontaneously. In that case man would find himself, as he does, in a universe of increasing entropy as the fluctuation recedes. Boltzmann, it seems, was prepared to take this argument seriously on the grounds that sentient creatures could only appear as the aftermath of a large enough fluctuation. What happened during the inconceivably prolonged waiting period is irrelevant.

Modern cosmology shows, however, that the universe is ordered on a scale enormously greater than is needed for living creatures to evolve, and Boltzmann’s hypothesis is correspondingly rendered improbable in the highest degree. Whatever started the universe in a state from which it could evolve with an increase of entropy, it was not a simple fluctuation from equilibrium. The sensation of time’s arrow is thus referred back to the creation of the universe, an act that lies beyond the