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Chaos: our past, present and future
Oct. 29th, 2024 03:15 amThe Big Bang and “leaky” black holes, stars and comets are primordial chaos seeders that eventually allowed life (a temporary semi-chaotic unstable cycle) to spring from nothing. All our creation myths obscure this universal truth to various degrees (e.g. Greek, Abrahamic and other myths by anthropomorphizing the beginning, and quickly moving on to a human relatable soap opera of increasing complexity that strongly obscures our beginning and eventually our end as well, e.g. by presenting a non-chaotic and unrealistic end: Heaven/hell, Hades/Olympus, Valhalla, reincarnation/nirvana, etc). Hindu eschatology (see Kalki) is probably the closest to the truth: universal cycles of varying chaos (from absolute chaos such as the Big Bang to relative periods of aparent order such as now).
Our present is mainly built on assuming that chaos is rare which is the reason that war, natural calamities and other black swan events are poorly codified and managed. Conversely, domains in which chaos (also called risk) is more common usually generate outsized profits (e.g. war, insurance schemes) and domains in which chaos is less common generate less profit (e.g. individual and national mortgages which are perceived as low risk). There is always a gap between actual risk and expected risk and this gap is a profit generator when gauged correctly and a chaos enhancer otherwise (e.g. subprime crisis, sovereign defaults).
Our future will definitely see more chaos: climate change, natural calamities, wars, pestilence, tech singularity and ultimately for Earth, our star’s demise. I just hope that we get better at recognizing and accounting for all the chaos around us and especially the chaos we produce ourselves.
LE: Via a map purported to be the first world map, a map attributed to Anaximander which divides the world into Europe, Asia and Libya, I was reacquainted with Anaximander and his apeiron, the concept of nothingness from which everything springs again and again and to which everything always returns to as well (a sort of primordial black hole). So, I searched Anaximander on FB and most hits were a context-less simulacra of his map, a few pictures of (his) sundials and even fewer mentions of his philosophy and his apeiron. The exercise reminded me of the repetition of human history, actions and dialogues as well as the decay of ideas and philosophies into their most digestible and easy to grasp parts to the point of illegibility and v’gerism (i.e. cargo cultism). Nașpa sexo-marxist wookieness, eh?
LE2: Some humans inject varying degrees of chaos into human society as well, some more successfully than others (e.g. prophets, emperors, dictators, leaders of powerful nations or organizations). As of the last few decades, it appears that entropy is uptrending due to human and/or climate activity, but we need not fear as the AI singularity is upon us to save us from ourselves and the only unknown is whether it will take the form of a cyborg(s) takeover, Colossus, or some other permutation. Of course, there are other cheery scenarios: the simulation hypothesis, a hard-to-predict alien invasion (or a galactic h2g2 scenario), self-destruction through MAD or some other unforeseen calamity.
Our present is mainly built on assuming that chaos is rare which is the reason that war, natural calamities and other black swan events are poorly codified and managed. Conversely, domains in which chaos (also called risk) is more common usually generate outsized profits (e.g. war, insurance schemes) and domains in which chaos is less common generate less profit (e.g. individual and national mortgages which are perceived as low risk). There is always a gap between actual risk and expected risk and this gap is a profit generator when gauged correctly and a chaos enhancer otherwise (e.g. subprime crisis, sovereign defaults).
Our future will definitely see more chaos: climate change, natural calamities, wars, pestilence, tech singularity and ultimately for Earth, our star’s demise. I just hope that we get better at recognizing and accounting for all the chaos around us and especially the chaos we produce ourselves.
LE: Via a map purported to be the first world map, a map attributed to Anaximander which divides the world into Europe, Asia and Libya, I was reacquainted with Anaximander and his apeiron, the concept of nothingness from which everything springs again and again and to which everything always returns to as well (a sort of primordial black hole). So, I searched Anaximander on FB and most hits were a context-less simulacra of his map, a few pictures of (his) sundials and even fewer mentions of his philosophy and his apeiron. The exercise reminded me of the repetition of human history, actions and dialogues as well as the decay of ideas and philosophies into their most digestible and easy to grasp parts to the point of illegibility and v’gerism (i.e. cargo cultism). Nașpa sexo-marxist wookieness, eh?
LE2: Some humans inject varying degrees of chaos into human society as well, some more successfully than others (e.g. prophets, emperors, dictators, leaders of powerful nations or organizations). As of the last few decades, it appears that entropy is uptrending due to human and/or climate activity, but we need not fear as the AI singularity is upon us to save us from ourselves and the only unknown is whether it will take the form of a cyborg(s) takeover, Colossus, or some other permutation. Of course, there are other cheery scenarios: the simulation hypothesis, a hard-to-predict alien invasion (or a galactic h2g2 scenario), self-destruction through MAD or some other unforeseen calamity.
