What Lies Between Order and Chaos?

Publisher Summary Over the last several decades, science's view of nature's lack of structure—its unpredictability—underwent a major renovation with the discovery of deterministic chaos. The experimenters noted that when tuning the circuit, “an irregular noise is often heard in the telephone receivers before the frequency jumps to the next lower value.” Much of the appreciation of nature depends on whether humans or the computers are prepared to discern its intricacies. Psychology and philosophy in the twentieth century were punctuated by a series of similar disappointments. Limitations and the complication they engender permeate much more than just mathematics and physics. Natural language also shows a balance between order and randomness. On the one hand, there is a need for static structures, such as a vocabulary and a grammar, so that two people can communicate. On the other hand, there would be no need to communicate if spoken utterances were completely predictable by the listener. Order is the foundation of communication between elements at any level of organization, whether that refers to a population of neurons, bees, or humans. Complexity arises in the middle ground, at the onset of chaos—the order–disorder border. All natural systems that evolve with and learn from interaction with their immediate environment exhibit both structural order and dynamical chaos.