“The truly creative changes and the big shifts occur right at the edge of chaos,” said Dr. Robert Bilder, a psychiatry and psychology professor at UCLA's Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior.
The concept of chaos has been studied since the times of the ancient Egyptians. The goddess Ma'at was symbolic of the concept of ‘Order’. She was truth, order, balance, and justice personified. It was thought that if Ma'at didn't exist, the universe would return to chaos, as the Egyptians believed that the universe was an ordered place. The cycles of the universe always remained constant.
Similarly, one of the biggest questions that modern philosophers and scientists have is understanding whether everything we experience follows fixed laws or not. The 20th-century mathematician Edward Lorenz is the creator of ‘chaos theory’ a developing branch of interdisciplinary scientific-mathematical theory focused on the underlying patterns of chaotic systems. The theory was summarised by Edward Lorenz as follows:
Chaos: When the present determines the future, but the approximate present does not approximately determine the future.
To understand this better, it can be broken down. A chaotic system has three defining features:
Chaotic systems are deterministic. Determinism is a philosophical theory that posits that all events are completely determined by previously existing causes. In other words, events are the effect of an unbroken chain of prior occurrences. The deterministic nature of these systems does not make them predictable.
Chaotic systems are sensitive to initial conditions; even a very slight change at a starting point can lead to significantly different outcomes. An easier way to understand this is through Ray Bradbury’s metaphor from A Sound Of Thunder, where a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil can cause a tornado in Texas.
Chaotic systems are not truly random or disorderly. Instead, modern science has found that even chaos has patterns, feedback loops, repetitions and self-organisation. The ancient Egyptians were right: there is order in chaos.
This behaviour is known as deterministic chaos, or simply chaos. Existing in many natural systems, including fluid flow, heartbeat irregularities, and road traffic, chaos theory has applications in a variety of disciplines. These include meteorology, where Edward Lorenz speciality lay, sociology, and economics. The theory formed the basis for such fields of study as the edge of chaos theory, created by Norman Packard.
Coined in the 1980s, the term ‘edge of chaos’ defined a hypothetical mathematical transitional space between order and disorder. There is a constant interplay between order and disorder, organisation and instability, both in continuous flux. Today, the phrase edge of chaos has come to refer to a metaphor that any physical, biological, economic and social systems operate in a region between order and chaos. Most traditional science is reductionist. It deals with problems by breaking them down to their smallest part and studying just the effect of wind on a plant for example, instead of the wind, location, light and all the factors that affect that plant.
Phenomena like gravity or electricity become predictable without complex interactions. Chaos is nonlinear. It deals with dynamic systems like turbulence, the stock market, and our brain states, in which we can never know all the initial conditions of a complex system in perfect detail. It is impossible to predict or control what happens in a complex system, making it difficult to consider from a reductionist scientific perspective. These systems are often described by fractal mathematics, in which fractals are a term for a never-ending pattern. Many natural objects exhibit fractal properties, including trees, organs, and rivers. Recognising our world’s chaotic, fractal nature can give us a new perspective and understanding of how the world works.
At the edge of chaos, there are two options: chaos or emergence. In philosophy, science, and art, emergence occurs when new features and properties emerge when the basic parts interact and self-organize to create new patterns of organization. This is similar to a statement made by Aristotle in his Metaphysics: “The whole is more than the sum of its parts”. To further understand this, some have used the example of a violin playing a classical piece and a five-person jazz band. The violin player performing a classical piece has notes that are pre-planned and practised. The jazz band has more instruments in the mix, and there will be no sheet music as the musicians will have to improvise. Without this improvisation, the jazz will become stagnant, dull and lifeless.
From disorder and dissonance, some new melodies will arise, and maybe the rhythm section will start repeating a bar that the vocalist picks up. Most importantly, the band has a chord sequence to guide them through the chaos of swinging jazz tunes. There must be a sweet spot between how ordered and disordered they are that make for the best spontaneous improvisation. This is the edge of chaos principle: the most complex patterns emerge when the system is not too chaotic, nor too ordered.
As Dr Bilder said, this ‘edge of chaos’ is where creativity thrives. Writer Mitchell Waldrop said: “The edge of chaos is where life has enough stability to sustain itself and enough creativity to deserve the name of life. The edge of chaos is where new ideas and innovative genotypes are forever nibbling away at the edges of the status quo, and where even the most entrenched old guard will eventually be overthrown.” Inspired by this study, the 2018 Edge of Chaos installation was created to collaborate with artists Vasilija Abramovic & Ruairi Glynn.
The interactive installation invites visitors to experience a chaotic system for themselves through a visual format. At its centre, a robotic tree representing Life is surrounded by geometric shapes with interactive surfaces that represent the edge of chaos. As audiences enter and touch the surfaces, light emanates from their area and interacts without light burst. The interactive surface and its emergent behaviours were developed between the labs at AMOLF, Amsterdam, and Bartlett UCL, London celebrating creative possibilities of collaborating across science, art and design. But what is most interesting about this visual model is how it shows that even the smallest injection of chaos can reverberate massively over the entire system.
The profit-driven forces of the modern world are driving huge economic and environmental challenges across the planet. “Even among people who work within the ‘creative industries’, their imagination seems increasingly harnessed to create demand for things nobody really needs,” said Rob Hopkins, writer of From What Is to What If: Unleashing the Power of Imagination to Create the Future We Want, “whose production is increasingly pushing our human and ecological systems to the brink of collapse – almost as if imagination has been co-opted in the service of our own extinction.” What happens when our current unsustainable way of living profoundly challenges our worldview?
We are constantly creating our own human chaotic system, which is in desperate need of an injection of chaos. Meaning-making, a term used in psychology, is defined simply as “making sense of or giving coherence to our experiences. Following the principle of sensitivity to initial conditions, a small change can reverberate like a ripple in a pond even within our human system. The nature of chaotic systems is their ability to change with even the smallest of changes. Even within the world’s complexity, there is order. If we can identify this order and inject a little chaos, we can disrupt the world for the better. By understanding that our ecosystems, our social systems, and our economic systems are interconnected, we can hope to avoid actions that may end up being detrimental to our long-term well-being.
Find out more about chaos theory here.
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