As part of my New Year’s Resolution to finish a book every month in 2023, the reading assignment for January was Chaos: Making a New Science by James Gleick. I picked this one up on sale for merely a dollar or so in Washougal, WA when the local library set up shop in the parking lot next to my apartment. The book caught my eye due in no small part to a class I took in college that piqued my curiosity toward Chaos Theory.
Chaos, as a field of science, is relatively new. Without delving into a full-on book review, I’d be remiss not to acknowledge the author’s ambitious but effective endeavor to chronicle its struggle & eventual acceptance into the scientific community. I was unfamiliar with this breed of protagonist, but chaos was a compelling one. The book contains many nuggets of wisdom as it follows the budding science across many disciplines, from meteorology to biology and beyond (some may take issue with the extent of “beyond” and argue that some claims are a reach, but they don’t take away from the legit nugs). I’ll be sharing some of my favorite concepts here, and attempt to explain how they harmoniously coalesced into a new worldview with another area of study from my college years: Chinese philosophy.
For me, the most profound moments came toward the end of the book. Whether this reflects a climactic intent by Gleick I’m not sure, but it definitely lends itself to good cinema. Maybe as a millennial who grew up with computers I just can’t help having an affinity for the parts about information theory, and I hope you forgive me for focusing mostly on them. The following paragraph follows the bold claim, credited to Rob Shaw, that chaos is the creation of information:
One could imagine water flowing past an obstruction. As every hydrodynamicist and white-water canoeist knows, if the water flows fast enough, it produces whorls downstream. At some speed, the whorls stay in place. At some higher speed, they move. An experimenter could choose a variety of methods for extracting data from such a system, with velocity probes and so forth, but why not try something simple: pick a point directly downstream from the obstruction and, at uniform time intervals, ask whether the whorl is to the right or the left.
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If the whorls are static, the data stream will look like this: left-left-left-left-left-left-left-left-left-left-left-left-left-left-left-left-loft-left-left-left-. After a while, the observer starts to feel that new bits of data are failing to offer new information about the system.
Or the whorls might be moving back and forth periodically: left-right-left-right-left-right-left-right-left-right-left-right-left-right-left-right-left-right-left-right-. Again, though at first the system seems one degree more interesting, it quickly ceases to offer any surprises.
As the system becomes chaotic, however, strictly by virtue of its unpredictability, it generates a steady stream of information. Each new observation is a new bit. This is a problem for the experimenter trying to characterize the system completely. “He could never leave the room,” as Shaw said. “The flow would be a continuous source of information.”
Computer jargon aside, let’s pretend that each new thing we learn is a “bit”. A bit of knowledge like a nugget of wisdom: not a full treatise or dissertation, more like “the sky is blue.” Or if you’re my DNA, “the hair is brown.” With this foundation of understanding, we have a perspective of chaos potentially removed from any overwhelming emotion due to it being inherently out of our control. Whenever something unexpected happens, we can channel The Dude from The Big Lebowski and simply exclaim “new shit has come to light!”
Okay, maybe easier said than done. Life is tough, and some unexpected events do not warrant such a reaction, such as the death of a loved one or the loss of a job. However, beyond the normal cycle of grief, there is opportunity for growth. And while it’s hard to see the road ahead sometimes, it’s in these moments that chaos can turn into a friend, especially when we are able to move our lives forward in new ways. I find solace in the fact that it’s a totally natural process, albeit challenging at times, that brings about new bits and keeps things interesting.
A few paragraphs later, still in the vein of information theory, Gleick quotes Shaw’s colleague Norman Packard:
“At the pinnacle of complicated dynamics are processes of biological evolution, or thought processes,” Packard said. “Intuitively there seems a clear sense in which these ultimately complicated systems are generating information. Billions of years ago there were just blobs of protoplasm; now billions of years later here we are. So information has been created and stored in our structure. In the development of one person’s mind from childhood, information is clearly not just accumulated but also generated — created from connections that were not there before.”
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This is where the rubber hit the road for me. While it may appear grossly reductionist on the surface, for all intents and purposes it’s an apt aphorism. It would be a shame to reduce the human experience to simply informatics, but it helps to have a theory with some purchase when asking life’s biggest questions. I think Packard is quite eloquent in the way that he provides it, too… we are special. In a world that can make us feel replaceable at work or unoriginal in our art, here we have a beautiful theory that asserts how unique we really are. Nobody has a mind quite like yours mine because nobody has your DNA or specific set of experiences. Instead of feeling lonely in this, I choose to rejoice and embrace the chaos.
One of the central tenets or prerequisites to define a system as chaotic is sensitive dependence on initial conditions. The most common example, The Butterfly Effect, illustrates this well. It also introduces doubt that we can ever truly conquer chaos. We simply cannot measure every square millimeter of the sky to forecast weather with 100% accuracy. Once again, I find solace in this. Where is the fun in a world where nothing is a prediction and everything is a guarantee?
In the last pages of the book, Gleick comes full circle to the findings in meteorology from the beginning, but this time with a special look at snowflakes:
Sensitive dependence on initial conditions serves not to destroy but to create. As a growing snowflake falls to earth, typically floating in the wind for an hour or more, the choices made by the branching tips at any instant depend sensitively on such things as the temperature, the humidity, and the presence of impurities in the atmosphere. The six tips of a single snowflake, spreading within a millimeter space, feel the same temperatures, and because the laws of growth are purely deterministic, they maintain a near-perfect symmetry. But the nature of turbulent air is such that any pair of snowflakes will experience very different paths. The final flake records the history of all the changing weather conditions it has experienced, and the combinations may as well be infinite.
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There are still a few pages after this but it hits like the coup de grâce to any doubt in the power of chaos theory. You can imagine I was especially amused as a millennial who hears his generation compared to snowflakes in a derogatory way. This might as well be scientific proof that we’re all snowflakes! In this context it’s not meant to connote fragility (we all break the same after all) but rather individuation. We can compare our specific set of experiences in life to the specific values of temperature, humidity, and presence of impurities in the atmosphere that a growing snowflake will pass through on its unique path to the ground.
One of the most haunting song lyrics I ever heard was from Helplessness Blues by Fleet Foxes:
I was raised up believing I was somehow unique
Robin Pecknold
Like a snowflake distinct among snowflakes, unique in each way you can see
And now after some thinking, I’d say I’d rather be
A functioning cog in some great machinery serving something beyond me
After reading this book, I can’t help but think “por que no los dos?” I think Robin speaks for all of us with his message that it’s not enough just to be special – we want to be useful. Economically speaking, humanity benefits from specialization, so why can’t we all be both snowflakes and also functioning cogs?
That’s all well and good, you may say, but what does any of this have to do with Taoism? Fair question, considering the title of the post. I saved it for last not to force the connection, but rather to leave you with something to chew on…
Ever since learning about Taoism in a class at the University of Oregon, it intuitively made sense to me. The essential principles of The Dao (道) and Wu Wei (無為), which translate to “way” and “inaction”, came to mind after reading Chaos and pondering upon its wider philosophical implications. From one perspective, Taosim is basically determinism without the depression, or a more romantic version of it. Taoists believe in a natural order to the universe, or more literally “The Way” in which it unfolds. Humans are supposed to live harmoniously with The Way, which means taking decisive action based on intuition, or other times decisively not taking any action. We know from the song Freewill by Rush that “if you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice!” Although, speaking of free will, you might ask how it has any place in a deterministic paradigm like this, where all decisions are dictated by The Way?
I’m here to say that it fits right in there. You may make mistakes that are incompatible with The Way, and that’s okay! These forks in the road are probabilistic bifurcations, and you’re like a snowflake that can “choose” to go left or right at any point in its flight. You are free to take either road, just don’t be so arrogant to claim you’re the first one to think of it. Free will doesn’t necessitate absolute agency, as any action could be considered one among a multitude of possibilities – it may as well be infinity, but it also may as well be a number so large that it merely approaches infinity, like one of those functions from calculus. This is another way of saying we’re all bound by our earthly bodies, so you can’t will anything into being. Chances are the universe has already accounted for your antics, and will course-correct. Some may call this Karma. If you pay attention and learn from your mistakes, life becomes easier. You can find Your Way within The Way, and become a functioning cog without sacrificing your uniqueness. Or, to quote another American artist, Get In Where You Fit In.
Any good God-fearing man will find a place for him in his worldview, so I’ll leave you with this quote from Chaos, eloquently put forward by physicist Joseph Ford:
“God plays dice with the universe … But they’re loaded dice. And the main objective of physics now is to find out by what rules were they loaded and how can we use them for our own ends.”
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