Out beyond right and wrong, there is a field. I will meet you there…

Rumi

In the last blog post I wrote, I played with the idea of our maps of reality and how do we know they are correct – and what happens if we allow ourselves to change them.

Buckle up.

The image at the top of this post is a tiny part of one of the most profound and mind-blowing objects I have ever encountered. It is a small part (however, itself infinite) of the granddaddy fractal – the Mandelbrot Set. It emerges from applying a simple mathematical relation iteratively; Z = Z² + C. An iteration is simply applying this rule over and over (starting with Z as zero, and C as a value in the domain of numbers). For ordinary ‘real’ numbers the result is trivial (and left as an exercise to the interested reader). The twist here is that Z and C here are complex numbers – and I am not going to get into that here. Look it up – and go spend some time on youtube; there are some incredible videos that dive deeply (like, deeper-than-the-scale-of-the-known-universe deeply) into this most wondrous object.

When chaos theory and the world of fractals emerged into the mainstream in the 70s and 80s [1] (as computers got fast enough to penetrate their world), it was a game-changer in our appreciation of the universe. The old image of a predictable ‘clockwork’ reality – just know the initial conditions and the laws of physics and you know exactly what happens next – was blown out of the water. The tiniest change in any of those initial conditions and the future evolution would diverge wildly. Why life remains so mysterious. It is why accurate weather forecasts out more than a few days are practically impossible, no matter how much computing power you have – although we have got a lot better in recent decades…

Living our lives can be seen as an ‘iteration’ problem. At each moment, we choose (conciously or not) which leads to the next moment. A simplistic choice model with large ‘this-and-not-that’ regions might be comforting and lead to some predictability in outcomes – but what if the underlying nature of reality looks like the image above? Lets say the black part (those areas that are definitely part of the Mandelbrot set) represent terrible outcomes (think diving off a mountain without a parachute). Outside of that area there are so many shades of colour, detail and richness. However the edge is incredibly crinkly. Choosing one of those points (talking to that cute Girl/Guy at the checkout counter – just because, sitting in the road to protest against climate change, writing that edgy novel, leaving a relationship that is bad for you, quitting your job and starting out on your own) is unpredictable. Where will you end up? And after the next decision, and the next?

There are ‘safe’ areas out there, well away from the crinkly rich edges, that are more predictable. They have less detail, there is a lot less going on. Might be a bit boring. The edges are anything but boring – there is life, colour, richness, risk, excitement, passion – all of it all at once. A coral-reef of vibrant intense possibility.

Trying to draw a line through this world and say ‘this side, not that side’ is an impossible task. Even if you allow yourself a bunch of lines to draw; judgments about the world – to mark out a ‘right’ way to live – it cannot approach the complexity, intricacy and beauty of the whole. Any map you make is doomed to being incomplete. The mind of God is so much bigger…

Thinkers throughout the ages have wrestled with versions of this conundrum about life. Aristotle drew a distinction between the Law (lines drawn through reality) and Justice (the intricate detailed world of human experience) – noting that the Law could never fully encapsulate the concept of justice; why judges in a free and equitable society must be able to re-interpret and take into account wider circumstances in an approach to actual justice. I think this also holds an echo of what Kurt Gödel pointed at with his incompleteness theorem; that any way of symbolic reasoning we come up with will never fully encapsulate ‘truth’; there will always be truths any symbolic system of reasoning cannot capture.

What I take from this; Life is infinitely rich, full of possibility, infinitely detailed. We have maps and we know that the maps are at best incomplete and at worst imprison us in a vastly diminished life. The way out? Be willing to throw away the maps, build new ones, throw those away, explore further, deeper. Keep going.

Life is two dots and a dash. No one ever said the dash had to be anything like a straight line…

5Apr23

[1] James Gleick – Chaos: Making a New Science. New York, N.Y., U.S.A., Penguin, 1988