Heroes Not Zombies

One of the strongest characteristics which human beings have is our ability to make links.

We connect what we see to what we have already seen and to what we imagine we might be able to see.

There’s a lot in that sentence, but I’m not going to unpick it right now….suffice to say we blend the perceptions of the present with memory and imagination.

That is an incredible power.

It helps us to discern patterns which we use to recognise what we are perceiving and to be able to make reasonable assumptions about the future.

For example, as a doctor I learned how to diagnose. Diagnosing involves listening to a person’s description of their experience and to their telling of their story, examining them physically if needed, then conducting certain tests if still not in a position to make a good diagnosis. A diagnosis enabled me to do two things – firstly, to recognise both the likely disease or pathology underlying the patient’s experience, and secondly, to gain an understanding what that meant in this person’s life. Yep, diagnosis is more than naming a disease. It’s about arriving at a level of understanding – an understanding of this illness in this person’s life.

Once I had a diagnosis I could then decide how to act. I could decide what to do and how quickly I had to do it. At that moment I’d be imagining certain futures. If I do this, then what might happen, and if I do that instead, what might happen? How quickly might those possible futures become real? To answer those questions I needed a knowledge of the patterns of disease – how is this disease likely to develop based on what we have all seen so far?

I picked this image today to reflect on our ability to recognise patterns around us, AND to apply those patterns widely. When we look at something, we don’t just “see it as it is”, because everything we see, hear, smell, taste, touch, sets off chains of memory and imagination.

So when I look at this particular tree I see these three enormous swirls. They look like whirlpools and water eddying around hidden rocks. A while ago I learned about complexity science and it really opened up my understanding of the world.

There are certain characteristic features of complex systems and one of them is the existence of “attractors”. “Attractors” are kind of organising points. They are part of what creates the differences within any given system or object. I’ve seen some scientists describe reality as “lumpy” rather than “smooth” and although I don’t really like that language I understand what they mean.

The universe is not uniform.

The phenomena of the universe are not distributed uniformly.

There are three common kinds of attractor –

Point attractors – these organise the surrounds around a single point. These three knots in this wood look a bit like three point attractors.

Loop attractors – this is where there are two centres of attraction acting together as one. They produce what looks like an infinity loop, or a figure or 8. They are a way of seeing polar opposites as part of the same system.

Strange attractors – also called complex attractors. This is where there are a number of centres of attraction all interacting within the same system. It can be hard to see any patterns here but we can recognise them when we seem the whole system. In other words, if we zoom in too close and focus only on certain parts we can’t see the way this system as a whole behaves. But when we stand back, zoom out, climb the hill, “take the view from on high”, or however else you want to describe it, we see that all the apparently separate parts are actually interconnected and working together.

I think as you encounter the world, you’ll see examples of these three kinds of attractor everywhere. See how many you can spot this week.

Ok, so, let me be clear. This is MY interpretation of these things. I’m not a complexity scientist. I just wanted to share how I make sense of my life and the world I live in.

I hope that there might be something here which sheds a light on things for you too.