Chaos And Complexity

Implications For Psychological Theory And Practice

Michael R. Butz

• Publisher: CRC Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781560324188
• eBook ISBN: 9781351461863
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Psychiatry & Mental Health

The nature of this book is to emphasize the inherent complexity and richness of the human experience of change. Now, the author believes there to be an acceptable "scientific" explanation for this phenomona. Explored here are 30 years of studies to describe nonlinear dynamics, today termed either chaos theory or complexity theory. The connotations of both theories are discussed at length. Offering social scientists validation in their attempts to describe and define phenomona of a previously ineffable nature, this book explores chaos' implications for psychology and the social sciences. It describes the benefits psychology can glean from using ideas in chaos theory and applying them to psychology in general, individual psycho-therapy, couples therapy, and community psychology, and also considers possible directions for research and application.

Part 1

Chaos, Complexity, and Psychology

“Nearly all of humanity shares your predicament.” “And what predicament is that?” “I thought I had already explained that,” he said patiently. “If you don’t get what you want, you suffer; if you get what you don’t want, you suffer; even when you get exactly what you want, you still suffer because you can’t hold onto it forever. Your mind is your predicament. It wants to be free of change, free of pain, free of obligations of life and death. But change is a law, and no amount of pretending will alter that reality.”

Dan Millman (1980, p. 61)

Chapter 1

Chaos and Complexity: Psychology’s New Friends?

At the heart of psychology is the process of change. Change is that process that ferries people from one stable period to the next in their lives. During these occasions, it may seem perplexing, if not impossible, to attain self-knowledge or to clearly identify the direction one’s life is taking. Indeed, this is an age-old dilemma that people throughout the world have struggled with since time immemorial. In many cultures, change has historically been dealt with through myths and stories. Here in the West, the focus has been different. Science has largely replaced myth and story here in the West, and the dilemma of change from a more rational stance is one of keeping things the same, as in the dialogue above. Notwithstanding these differences in world view, change has come to be portrayed today by the word chaos, as it was long ago.

It may be safe to say that virtually all of psychology, and science in general, is devoted directly or indirectly to understanding this process of change. In the last century, no set of ideas has advanced this pursuit more than what is called chaos theory and, more recently, complexity theory. Encapsulated in these terms are a number of revolutionary ideas about change that have shifted scientists’ focus from reductionism toward holistic diversity. For psychology, and the social sciences in general, these ideas offer both validation for time honored touchstones and promise for more holistic conceptualizations of the change process.

Chaos and complexity theories represent the cutting edge of modern science today, helping scientists from differing disciplines to explain a wide variety of phenomena. Until recently, however, these theories have been regarded as the providence of the physical sciences, such as mathematics, physics, and biology. The question then arises, “What possible connection do psychology and other social sciences have with math, physics, or biology?”

History has shown that many theories previously associated with the physical sciences have been influential to theorists in psychology or related disciplines. Freud, for example, applied the biological principle of the reflex arc in his work; Erikson used the epigenic principle to describe psychosocial development; and family therapy used cybernetic theory and general systems theory to illustrate communication dynamics. In fact, theoreticians of this caliber typically address the influence of these ideas from the physical science early in their essays, which often unfold into profound theoretical ideas for social scientists.

Despite the historical relationship between psychology and the physical sciences, it appears simple-minded at best to conclude that chaos or complexity theory would be similarly applicable to psychology and other related disciplines. In fact, the balance of this book is geared toward addressing that issue, because the task ahead is to demonstrate the heuristic value of this integration.

At this point, suffice it to note that chaos theory has ignited increasing attention in the psychological community, evidenced by the growing amount of information available on the topic in text and in spoken word.¹ Chaos theory has in fact already been applied to a number of central ideas in psychology, which are addressed later at length. Just as chaos theory has engendered so much interest, complexity theory, a more recent set of ideas, is expected to generate a similar degree of interest.

The focus of the next several pages is to explain these theories in terms of a science and then explore how combining some key ideas in chaos and complexity theory with psychological concepts, old and new, strengthens psychology as a discipline and at the same time enriches the human condition.

CHAOS AND COMPLEXITY IN SCIENCE

First, it is necessary to identify chaos theory in terms of science. Theorists in this area will be quick to state that the term chaos and the idea of chaos theory as a science are in essence misnomers for a number of reasons. The phenomenon described as chaos has an underlying order and is not really chaotic at all. The behavior of what generally may be called a system, which can be anything from a chemical reaction to a business organization, may look random or chaotic, but according to this set of ideas, within that apparent randomness is order or an emerging order. The important thing to remember is that these ideas were named chaos theory because this apparently random behavior was experienced as chaos by scientists.

It should be mentioned here that the philosophical concept of chaos has long been regarded as a useful mythological tool to describe the unsettling experience of change. The import of this aspect of chaos is described later in chapter 10. For now, it is simply important to recognize that, although some scientists would like these ideas to be mutually exclusive, they are not really that far apart.

Theorists may also argue that chaos theory isn’t truly a science. Although the scientific community is divided on this issue, it is agreed that, to a certain extent, chaos theory is a term that represents change in a nonclassical or nonlinear manner. There have also been other nonlinear and nonclassical scientific pursuits, one such example being complexity theory.

Complexity theory, though lacking the mythological connotations of chaos theory, does challenge the reductionistic focus science has had with the law of parsimony and other similarly limiting notions. This theory was an outgrowth of the work that was being done on chaos theory and found voice in studies on artificial life. The central assumption of complexity theory is that systems may teeter at the edge of chaos to enliven enough diversity to adapt to environmental demands in a novel way. Consequently, ideas in chaos and complexity theory have become important to scientists because they have better heuristic value or, stated another way, they explain more phenomena than previous models.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF CHAOS

At this point it is obligatory to address some of the central ideas from chaos and complexity theory that are applicable to psychology. As is true for most of this text, a basic “nuts and bolts” explanation is supplied for more conceptual description of rather complicated technical material. The purpose of this approach is to make these ideas available to a wider audience without simplifying concepts to the point that the descriptions become meaningless.

A second reason for this approach, as mentioned in the preface, is that there is fairly widespread disagreement about more technical aspects of these areas of study. A common language across, and even within disciplines, has been lacking (J. Goldstein, 1995), and consequently describing these areas of study in technical terms would entail a far more convoluted and potentially confusing set of descriptions. As Horgan (1995) indicated, moving into these more technical arguments would shift the discussion from “complexity to perplexity.”

For the reader who fancies more detailed, and at the same time accessible, descriptions of the technical aspects of these ideas, the following texts are recommended: Briggs and Peat’s (1989) Turbulent Mirror or Gleick’s (1987) Chaos: Making a New Science, and Waldrop’s (1992) Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos.² A particularly good and recent text is Capra’s (1996) The Web of Life, where he has written a wonderful holistic history of systems that spans the insights of Goethe to Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis. The history he offered also makes note of a scientist that for a wide variety of reasons has been overlooked or excluded from reference here in the West, largely because of political issues. Alexander Bogdanov’s theory of tektology (Capra, 1996, pp. 43–46), it seems, actually anticipated many of the concepts that over the course of this century have been considered revolutionary systemic insights. In the pages to follow, some of the primary theoreticians in these areas are presented, along with the dynamics that their theories describe and the potential application of their theories to psychological concepts.

Henri Poincaré

Henri Poincaré, a scientist who lived at the turn of the century, is generally considered the grandfather of chaos theory. He gained this distinction for his work with the “three body problem,”which dealt with the dynamics of planetary motion (three planets). Poincaré showed that the solution to the three body problem was—“no solution.” In other words, he proved that Isaac Newton’s clockwork-like laws of planetary motion only held if there were two planets involved. He demonstrated mathematically that by introducing a third planet, one could only approximate planetary motion—not predict it. In essence, Poincaré unhinged the notion of a predictable and ordered universe that had prevailed since the late 1600s. Two ideas are central to keep in mind here, the notion of stability and the idea that simple systems (such as just three planets in motion) can produce behavior so complex that it cannot be predicted.

Edward Lorenz

Edward Lorenz, whose work echoes Poincaré’s descriptions of stability and prediction, has generally been given credit as one of the parents of chaos theory. His work in meteorology in the early 1960s has consistently been described as the gateway back to Poincaré’s work and the door through which our current notion about chaos theory emerged.

Ironically, Lorenz’s initial encounter with chaos theory was inadvertent. In his attempt to predict the weather, Lorenz discovered nonlinear phenomena. This is noteworthy because he went looking for it with classical, linear, or reductionistic glasses on.

Lorenz was part of a movement of meteorologists, who at that time in history pursued their discipline from a classical scientific stance. Their vision was that if they could only establish enough data collection points throughout the globe, and collate this data, they could predict the weather well into the foreseeable future—they would have the entire data set.

In pursuing this vision, Lorenz was in the process of replicating weather patterns using one of the early digital computers available in 1961. This replicated weather system seemed to match patterns that existed in nature. Each pattern started with an initial set of conditions, contained in a six decimal place code (.506127).

One day, Lorenz took a shortcut by inputting only a three decimal place code (.506), assuming that this would not affect the weather pattern in any deleterious manner. However, what he observed when he returned to the room was a weather pattern very different from the previous weather pattern created before by the simple six digit code.

On the basis of this finding, Lorenz concluded that initial conditions, inputs, or variables are terribly important and sensitive. By changing the initial conditions (that is, by omitting the information contained in the digits .000127), he effected a drastic change in the weather pattern. This was a startling discovery because classical scientific theory had historically disregarded the impact of such small units of information. Take, for example, rounding numbers up or down in statistical equations after the second decimal point. This is how small a piece of data or information we are focusing on. Losing track of such a small amount of information would not be so detrimental except that the import of this loss grows across time in its impact on the system.

What Lorenz discovered is somewhat jokingly called the butterfly effect. Technically, the butterfly effect is called “sensitive dependence on initial conditions.” In other words, a variable metaphorically as tiny as a butterfly flapping its wings in a weather system over San Francisco may cause a thunderstorm over Denver several days later. But, by the same token, if the butterfly does not flap its wings, it may stop a thunderstorm from occurring in that part of the country. Thus, the import of a seemingly minuscule variable becomes obvious—an initial change will grow across time, as will its impact on the system.

From Lorenz’s work, one may surmise that a tiny difference in initial conditions, input, or variables is able to destabilize a system and begin a sequence that moves coward, and can cause, chaos. In the state of chaos, prediction is lost. As a result, extended weather prediction is also lost because it is impossible to account for the behavior of one butterfly in a weather system.

At this point, the reader may ask, “so how did all this stuff about planets gyrating and butterflies fluttering become chaos theory?” This is a good question, which leads co an interesting story.

James Yorke

In 1975, James Yorke, a mathematician, introduced the term chaos. He had been studying Lorenz’s work concerning sensitive dependence on initial conditions and wanted to share these findings with the rest of the scientific community. Still, he was stymied by how far from so-called classical science Lorenz’s work strayed. He concluded that the apparently random behavior exhibited by Lorenz’ computer weather system “looked like” chaos. In fact, Yorke “found himself helpless to phrase ideas in a form physics journals would find acceptable,” and so he used the title “Period Three Implies Chaos” to communicate the idea of disorder to physicists (Gleick, 1987, 0. 69).

Although chaos was the term chosen by Yorke to describe Lorenz’s findings to a wider audience, the word chaos is again a misidentification. According to Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary (1985), chaos implies imagery consistent with “a state of things in which chance is supreme; esp: the confused unorganized state of orimordial matter before the creation of distinct forms.” This is inconsistent with the identification of chaos in the physical sciences, where it is used to describe systems whose complexity and dynamics only appear to be chaotic at the local level. When these same dynamics are observed at the global level, they reveal an underlying order.

Davies (1989) clearly made the distinctions between what can be called mythological or philosophical chaos in the European tradition (as described in Webster’s) and scientific chaos:

Originally used by the Greeks to describe the limitless void, it is now used to describe unpredictable and apparently random structures. The study of chaos using topology and computers has become a major part of modern mathematics, revealing universal and fundamental laws of remarkably simple kind. (Davies, 1989, p. 494)

The difference in definition is vitally important because scientists such as Yorke experienced the phenomenon as resonating with chaos in a mythological sense. The consequence of this difference is how chaos as a mythological tool has signified radical change in numerous ancient cultures while finding an equally important position in its contemporary scientific incarnation. Later in the book, a wider net is cast to include these differences as a focal point for integration between science and myth.

SOME BASIC PRINCIPLES OF CHAOS AND COMPLEXITY

Under the rubrics of chaos and complexity theory, a number of different fields and specialties are encompassed. It is not a unified field, as some may perceive. The three major distinctions in chaos theory are between dynamical s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• PART 1 : CHAOS, COMPLEXITY, AND PSYCHOLOGY
• PART 2: APPLYING CHAOS AND COMPLEXITY TO PSYCHOLOGY
• PART 3: AN INDIVIDUAL IN CHAOS
• PART 4: CHAOS AND COMPLEXITY IN RELATIONS
• PART 5: ACROSS DISCIPLINES AND ON TOWARD THE HORIZON
• References
• Endnotes
• Index