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jguillen's picture

From our last class, I

From our last class, I found it very interesting to talk about the fact that there is a lot of incomputable stuff out there and that even though we are deeply impressed with deterministic systems, they can only do so much.

As far as making sense of the world, I think that the question of the relationship between disorganization and pattern is very important and one that will lead us to more questions than actual answers. Thinking about disorganization is very important to the discussion of emergence because it can help us to better understand and explain emerging elements as well as influence our thoughts on the implications of complexity.  

We agree that we live in a world that presents patterns of both organized and disorganized elements. The more that we talk about disorganization, the more that we are realizing that it is an important element and not necessarily a secondary product.

The "Ways of Making Sense of the World" exhibit provides us with three different approaches to making sense of the world which include:

  • 1) Primal spatial patterns as the explanation for all organization and these patterns need to be uncovered by removing obscuring disorganization
  • 2) "deterministic emergence"-pattern and disorganization are the outcome of historical processes that basically follow simple and well-defined deterministic rules AND seeks to determine the starting conditions and rules which yield the current observation
  • 3) "Non-deterministic emergence" - Disorganization as the result of random (non-deterministic) processes that are a starting point as well as a continuing contributor to the historical process

In each approach there is a different goal, perception of time, and a status of organization. All of these approaches provide us with a different inquiry, but I'm wondering what other approaches have been proposed. I agree that the idea here is not to choose the "best" approach, but instead to accept them all as possibilities and to find a value in the relationship between them. As the exhibit mentions, "But perhaps inquiry isn't in fact about finding answers but instead about finding questions", and I agree.  Ultimately, this shows that one approach is simply insufficient in explaining the concept of disorganization.

Something that I found to be really interesting from the "Ways of Making Sense of the World" exhibit was the fact that it mentions that the "human brain has evolved to find patterns and so one's judgment that something is disorganized because it has not pattern is not a very reliable one", because it brings up a very important point about the importance of human judgment in determining and explaining what is disorganized. Everyone is going to have a different view on what shows disorganization and so I think that this adds another level of complexity to the discussion of disorganization.

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