Another Shape for Understandings
This is an image of the Mandelbrot Set. It is drawn with a computer on a Cartesian plane. The computer picks a point on the plane and plugs it recursively into a formula (Zn+1 = Zn2 + C). The output of the calculation is increased by one and then goes back in as the next input. If the series of outputs of the formula becomes predictable because they coalesce into a pattern, then the point gets a color. Different colors are assigned based on the number of iterations it takes before the outputs coalesce. If the outputs remain chaotic then the point is colored black.
I first ran into the Mandelbrot set in the early 1990’s when I read Chaos by James Gleick. Two ideas stuck with me from this book: self-similarity and chaos. These are both mathematical concepts and they provide insight into analogous ideas in Nature.
Self-similarity is the recurrence of similar patterns. If you look at the picture again you can see this on the spire emanating from about the center of the image to the bottom left. Along that spire are small black shapes that are self-similar to the large black shape. Look closely and you will see this shape and many others repeated many times. More abstractly, this makes me think about beauty. In general, neurologists agree that recognizing patterns is a component of what we understand as beautiful or attractive. I find the Mandelbrot set to be beautiful. I find a mountain range, the ocean, a pine tree, a fern leaf all to be beautiful. All of these natural elements contain elements of self-similarity whether drawn by an algorithm or by Nature.
Chaos is the absence of pattern. A definitional characteristic of chaos is unpredictability and along with that comes incomprehension. When I look at the Mandelbrot Set I tend to focus on the colorful patterns and ignore the black regions, as if the black regions were empty. However, I am coming to understand Chaos as possibility, or maybe fertility, primordial ooze.
In another James Gleick book, The Information, he wrote about Information Science, a field I didn’t know existed at the time. In the book he talks about Claude Shannon’s breakthrough theory that everything is information and that all information can be broken down into bits. Shannon coined the term “bit” as the basic unit of information or in his words, “the basic unit of uncertainty”. A bit might be signal or it might be noise. Just like with the Mandelbrot set, Information can have patterns and be recognizable, or it can be “negative information” or noise. Communication is accomplished only by differentiating the information, by separating the signal from the noise. The recipient in a conversation can only be sure they got the message, that they understood the signal, if they examine both the signal and the noise, the pattern and the chaos. We can only understand signal if we can understand the noise.
Shannon’s breakthrough makes it easy to understand noise as a mistake, that noise is entropy, that noise is the breakdown of information, noise is the incomprehensible component of communication that is useful to examine, but only useful in how it can help us discern the signal. I think this is backwards. Just as chaos is integral to pattern, noise is integral to communication.
I am searching for different ways of knowing, a different shape for understandings. My instinct is that there are understandings in chaos and noise that are not cognizable but are knowable. Humans have been trained to pay attention to recognizable patterns, to cognizable information. And, humans are capable of constructing meaning from the incognizable, from chaos, from noise. We have written off chaos and noise because we can’t access them with our brains, understand them with cognition, but we can access them with our bodies, find them in our consciousness.
Claude Shannon showed us how “information” could be represented as bits and the general assumption has become that all life can be understood as information, therefore it can be broken into bits, therefore we can be “uploaded” into a trans-human existence. Whether you believe a trans-human end state is possible or not It is what lies at the bottom of the gravity well created by the Capitalist algorithm.
I am trying to stop believing in right answers. I am trying to have faith in better questions. Maybe better questions live in chaos and noise. If so, we need very different SCUBA gear because swimming in chaos and noise will require us to hospice the masturbatory, hyper-rational, algorithmic, necrocapitalist assumptions (Machado de Oliviera) that profane life’s fruits by renouncing life’s compost. I am convinced that joy, love and contentment are sourced in our shit.
I’m trying to embody the truth that “Poetry is not a Luxury” (Audre Lorde), that “The Master’s Tools will Never Dismantle the Master’s House” (Audre Lorde), that algorithmically derived echo-chambers are the death of resilience (Robert Ulanowicz), that purity is not sustainable and swimming in the chaos and noise of neighborliness is the only way forward (Walter Bruegmann).
The work we need to do can only be done in Nature with machines as tools, not the other way around.
