Managing Chaos
This is a test we must pass if we are to survive
By Mike Meyer ~ Honolulu ~ December 1, 2019
Chaos is not the absence of order in our universe but the limitless diversity of order. At the practical human level chaos may best be considered as the order that is too complex for us to understand. The abandonment of the effort at that understanding directly affects our response to the management of chaotic situations and environments.
This is, perhaps, best illustrated by the problem of random numbers. There are many information processing situations, encryption and data security is the most common, that require random numbers. But a random number list is a very difficult thing to achieve. In fact, most such lists are pseudo-random numbers.
The universe and all components of it are information. This realization is the result of thousands of years of discovery and growing understanding. For almost all of our history, the pretense of random numbers was adequate. Fortune telling, entwined in our perception of the universe since the inception of language, relies on randomization to allow the future to be seen and those patterns to be interpreted.
We are pattern creating and matching beings. The evolution of language was our effort to impose order on the universe. This is the ultimate magic…
