Week 7 - Chaos Theory

“Ordered chaos” – does this sound familiar?

When I think about ordered chaos I immediately think about kids playing on the playground. They dart this way and that way, jump up and down, spin, spill, no order at all. And yet there is order...there is a greater container that confines the chaos. The timing is ordered...recess is at a certain time of the day, for a certain period of time. I am sure if someone ran time lapsed photography or analyzed the movement for patterns they would find them. Like the seemingly random movement of birds flying, or fish swimming show complex patterns of movement. It looks like chaos, but under deeper scrutiny shows order.

Fractals as patterns of complex systems

Fractals are self-similar, meaning that they contain copies of themselves and while they may not exhibit the same details at all scales, they exhibit the same type of structure.
(http://icb.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/46/6/902)
It is interesting to me how simple mathematical equations describe such beautiful and complex patterns.

Consciousness out of chaos?

From what I have been reading, there are some people who ascribe the chaos theory to how order can arise out of disorder, contrary to the second law of thermodynamics, entropy. I don't know if that is consciousness out of chaos, or the effect of consciousness ON chaos. Certainly, the more I allow my mind to wander, chaotically, or randomly, the more interesting things I find in my consciousness.