The Beauty of Chaos

Can you understand psychological processes without factoring in disorder? We tend to flee from disorder and chaos, identifying chaos with evil and destruction. However what if spiritual, social and psychological growth necessarily involves living with, or passing through, chaos? Jung differed from our usual Western approach, embracing the fragmentary propositions of the Greek philosopher Heraclitus, about world as flux, and the productive and disordered struggle between opposites. This view was reinforced after Jung’s studies in alchemy when he suggested that the experience of chaos, the materia confusa, is also the experience which both leads to transformation and is essential to transformation. At this time, the order that the ego wishes to impose on the world or the unconscious no longer works, and this failure is the moment of the possibility of new life.

Chaos and Nonlinear Psychology , 2020

The typical chapter in Chaos and Nonlinear Psychology looks at process more than content, to highlight key constructs and methods across chapters and how we can use these more in psychology and social sciences-formally, metaphorically, intuitively. This chapter, by contrast-coming after Section One, where our main themes and constructs have already been introduced-highlights important content that finally is revealed in a more dynamical frame. Five examples concern (1) Dynamical self; (2) Mental health and creative balance; (3) Toward finessing COVID-19; (4) Interconnection and The "Lost Darwin"; (5) Environmental engagement-and awe, aesthetic appreciation, humility. These build on each other as well. At times, the need for nonlinear complex models is less essential. Yet the intent here is to show just when it can matter most-and to highlight certain serious misunderstandings. One may even propose (as has already occurred in physics and biology) that it is time for a paradigm shift. As Guastello and Liebovitch (2009, p.1) put it in Chaos and Complexity in Psychology: "Psychology is not the first science to break out of the nonlinear rut ….the physical sciences made the transition more than a half-century ago."

Salient features of chaos theory are described and developed for use in understanding a wide range of social phenomena. Social power is construed as actions upon actions. This view of social power provides a bridge for connecting well-established features of chaos with many kinds of human actions and relationships. Chaos is treated not as a metaphor but as a distinct type of order in the universe. Limitations of chaos theory as a mathematical approach for description and prediction of social science data are presented. These limitations further foreground the usefulness of developing chaos theory into a conceptual rather than a mathematical approach to social science issues. This development leads to a more general horizon of issues concerning theory and social reality.

[Proceedings] 1992 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics

This essay is a trial on establishing a multilayer model for human cognitive processes. Routine procedures are explained by a first level With linear dynamics. More sophisticated procedures are at a second self-adaptive level. Complicated behavior and self-organized patterns emerge from a nonlinear dynamics, belonging to a third level.

2019

A book published as a result of a year-long collaborative project between masters level illustration students and participants of social service provider The Chaos Group, which was initiated to explore the potential of illustration to serve as a tool for exploring mental health. There have been numerous personal and collective outcomes of this project, one tangible result of this process is the book ‘CHAOS: A Co-Creation.' The project’s initial core aims arising from this session were to explore the potential of authorial illustration to unlock those places closed down by life’s negative experiences, and also to shine a light on the holistic approach that the CHAOS group take, through the participants’ own voices. Could an illustrational mindset – one rooted within personal authorship – bring out those personal voices, re-kindling a sense of worth and self-esteem

The Journal of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis, 1985

Creativity Research Journal , 2020

For many years, creativity research had been yielding contradictory results. More recently, these results have come to be regarded as creativity paradoxes. This research reviews a growing body of evidence that highly creative people tend to operate, either simultaneously or dynamically, at extremes along continuums, where the extremes are considered at odds with one another. More highly creative people, it seems, tend to find a middle way, not by operating at a mid-point along a continuum, but by operating at and blending two more-extreme positions. An argument is presented that this is consistent with complexity theory, particularly the order-chaos dynamic characteristic of CASs, and that the number of paradoxes discovered in creativity research provides evidence for creativity being a characteristic of CASs. Understanding creativity as a characteristic of CASs leads to a new view of creativity and innovation, which could result in better creativity enhancement and innovation management approaches while also leading to improved tools to identify highly creative individuals.

PsycEXTRA Dataset

Intellectus in formis agit universalitatem." Abū 'Alī al-Ḥusayn ibn 'Abd Allāh ibn Sīnā, c 1000 CE 2 "Silva rigens, informe chaos, concretio pugnax, discolor usie vultus, sibi dissona massa! Turbida temperiem, formam rudis, hispida cultum opat et a veteri cupiens exire tumultu artifices numeros et musica vincla requirit".. . .Bernardus Silvistris, c. 1147 CE 3 We live within the fractal interfaces of the individual, nature, and culture. Modern modes of communication, technology, and globalization increase the complexity and the speed of evolution of that interface. Advances in science and technology drive much of this evolution. Some of these advances are in computer systems (cyberspace); some are in the hybridization of the human body with robotics (cyborgs); and some are in communications, artificial intelligence, cloning, genetic manipulation, stem-cell ontogenetic manipulation, pharmaceutical and molecular manipulation, nanotechnology, and so on. This evolution of both society and the nature of being-in-the-world influences the programs of emancipation suggested by many 1 'Ardi' is the nickname for a 4.4 MYA Ardipithecus ramidus woman; 'Andy' is a nickname for androids in P. K. Dick's novel, Do androids dream of electric sheep? 2 "The universality of our ideas is the result of the activity of the mind itself." Ibn Sina is also known as Avicenna, 980-1037 CE. See http://esfltwu.pbworks.com/w/page/9577677/Avicenna 3 "Silva, intractable, a formless chaos, a hostile coalescence, the motley appearance of being, a mass discordant with itself, longs in her turbulence for a tempering power; in her crudity for form, in her rankness for cultivation. Yearning to emerge from her ancient confusion, she demands the shaping influence of number and the bonds of harmony." (Witherbee, 1973, p. 67; see also Stock, 1972, p. 69). Bernardus Silvistris aka Bernard Silvester, c. 1085-1178 CE. These quotes are not meant to imply credence to their NeoPlatonic influences, but rather for their implications for the natural processes and self-organizational aspects of evolution of nature: the cosmos, life, the human mind, and culture. Cybersexuality-evolution-bbi-v9.1.docx 2 theories of social philosophy. Cybersexuality-a philosophical, literary, and scientific genre inspired in part by new visions from science fiction-provides some prime examples (Wolmark, 1999). This evolution also evokes some fundamental human motivations, such as our desire to optimize knowledge and stability in our world views, to know our origins and destinies, our meaning, to satisfy our ontological-existential quests. The quests for truth and for stability are at once two sides of the same tapestry, sometimes in conflict with each other, and sometimes synergistic, but always interactive, playing in the same conceptual attractors. Personal and cultural innovation lies in exploring where and how to weave within these fractal imbrications, and these involve tensions of stability and change, homogeneity and heterogeneity. Systems theory instructs us that innovation, personal and cultural, requires instability. How does the tension between the need for stability and instability resolve itself? Or put another way, why does instability beget stability, and vice versa, in a seemingly never ending chain? Fundamental philosophical issues inform our lives, and vice versa. Basic philosophical positions affect all aspects of our personality and affect basic everyday decision-making as well as those that fundamentally direct the course of our lives. Furthermore, existential and religious ideas concern many people, and there are few areas in which independent thinking and creativity are more important, and which are exercised with greater diversity. Obviously, the evolution of human nature interacts with these ontological issues. Creative decision-making may be an increasingly important factor in this evolution, personally and culturally. This evolution is taken up here in the context of reviewing human evolution to the present, then in considering the potential changes in human nature based on trends in modern technology, and then examining their implications for what it means to be human, and especially whether human freedoms will be liberated or constrained in an increasingly technological society. Cybersexuality-evolution-bbi-v9.1.docx 3 New Perspectives Cybersexualities (Wolmark, 1999) emerges from the confluence of postmodern cultural theory, feminist theory, and recent trends in science fiction, and extrapolations from fields related to artificial intelligence, which are largely due to advances in technology. That is, the gap between science fiction and reality seems to be shrinking due to advances in technology. Postmodern cultural theory arises in turn partly from the synthesis of Marxist theory, psychoanalytic theory, and existentialism (Poster, 1989). But at the same time, postmodern (and post-analytic, and hermeneutic) theory has challenged these and other traditional views in many ways. Consequently, each of these, Marxist, psychoanalytic, and existential theories, has undergone a transformation while being conflated into the whole. For example, Lacan's psychoanalytic concepts became more socially and less biologically founded. These confluences were heavily influenced, at least for Wolmark, by two principal texts, which found high favor in certain tech-savvy literary circles: Donna Haraway's A Manifesto for Cyborgs (1985), and William Gibson's cyberpunk novel, Neuromancer (Gibson, 1984). Haraway, in her Manifesto (1985) says of the cyborg: A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction. Social reality is. .. our most important political construction.. . The international women's movements have constructed 'women's experience', as well as uncovered or discovered this crucial collective object.. . Liberation rests on the construction of the consciousness, the imaginative apprehension of oppression, and so of possibility. The cyborg is a matter of fiction and lived experience that changes what counts as women's experience.. . This is a struggle over life and death, but the boundary between science fiction and social

Complicity: An International Journal of Complexity in Education, 2012

It would be futile, John Dewey argued in 1902, to think that we have to choose between child-centered, progressive education and traditional, subject-matter-oriented approaches. Calling for adaptivity, he stressed that we need the act of balancing the one with the other. The tendency in current educational policy to lean in favor of traditional, disciplinary modes of control appears to lose sight of this need. The aim of this paper is to reconnect to the task of maintaining a balance between educational freedom and structure, using a variety of theoretical resources such as complexity science, and the philosophies of Deleuze and Guattari, Schiller, and Nietzsche. Based on these resources, the authors also discuss Steiner Waldorf education as an example of how educational practice may approach, and integrate the significance of chaos in the form of a "virtual pedagogy".

eLSE 2014

This paper presents an innovative method for constituting a community of learners through an online course platform. We examine the role of shared routines in stabilizing patterns of interaction, defining specific skills and required knowledge, consolidating communication, and establishing reputations. While predictability is a core resource for the construction of a productive online community of learners, unpredictability may also be used to harness a special form of continuous, intense involvement. For example, random rewards are often employed as incentives in gamified environments. A flow of transient, ephemeral information may stimulate engagement for fear of 'missing out', while a structured, predictable archiving system allows users to postpone accessing the information until it is urgently required. On these theoretical considerations, we designed the P.R.Frenzy_Feed platform that combines predictable and unpredictable events to engage users in a community of learning based on shared routines. P.R.Frenzy_Feed is designed as a forum of discussion for instructors and final-year students enrolled in an advanced computer networking course at University Politehnica of Bucharest. Unlike well-accustomed online forums of discussions, P.R.Frenzy_Feed incorporates the principle of 'chaos by design': it is not separated on topic-specific threads but, instead, it is organized (or rather dis-organized) as a single, unified flow of information on all possible topics, by all possible contributors. News about laboratories, exercises, and learning materials come to be interpolated with conversations about favorite horror movies, IT trivia, or other course-unrelated subjects. In this environment students have to follow attentively and dig after relevant content to keep pace with course requirements. To facilitate such an intense, regular engagement, we introduced a highly predictable Question of the Night mini-competition, in which students answer a riddle posted on the platform at midnight. Ultimately, we tried to create routines of interaction, learning, and informal conversation to constitute the social system of a community of learners. The case-study relies on the intermediary and final evaluations of students' and instructors' experience with P.R.Frenzy_Feed, based on semi-structured interviews. Results indicate that a combination of predictability and chaos can be an effective resource to stimulate community building. An important challenge resides in effectively maintaining the promised uniformity in the predictable components, in order to avoid user disengagement.