S E I Z I N G    Z A D E H
       Fuzzy Ruminations on Chaos, Complexity, and Conspiracy
For most of us, each day of our lives is an awakening to a ceaseless assault of information.  Our senses quickly saturate our brains with the signs, symbols, and assorted info-artifacts of an all-pervasive mass-media-fueled culture.  The meaning of so many ‘meaningfuls’ seems unknowable.
And as the total amount of stored information grows--doubling every five years--our perception of our world grows fuzzier. We recall faintly, perhaps, a time when the world made a simpler kind of sense--not absolutely knowable, of course, but consistent and customary.  The erosion of this perception has been a long time in the making.  The approaching millennial ending/beginning offers itself as an historical/ cultural convergence point for all our anxieties wrought in this ever-complexifying world.
In his book 'The Third Wave' (1981), social philosopher Alvin Toffler writes: "The sudden shift of social ground rules today, the smudging of roles, status distinctions, and lines of authority ... and above all the breakup of the great thought system, indust-reality, have shattered the world-image most of us carry around in our skulls.  In consequence, most people surveying the world around them today see only chaos."
Apparently, people also talk of chaos. The intellectually and fashionably effete, faced with the confounding consequences of complexity, throw up their hands in mock adulation, proclaiming "All hail the Age of Disorder!  All hail Chaos!"  Chaos, I have come to realize, is easy to recognize, far more difficult to cope with.  Modifying language is our most basic adaptation to a chaotic world.  The construction of our so-called “world-image” is enabled by language.  As a long-time observer of linguistic trends, I have noticed a consistent increase in the use of terminology borrowed from the science of Dynamic Systems: non-linearity, instability, positive feedback, criticality, complexity ... and the popular fascination with fractals--generated by an algorithmic self-modeling computer program--stands as a visual, even iconic, acknowledgement to the turbulent flow of world events.
	In the past few years the work of mathematician and complexity scientist Lofti Zadeh has been making a resurgence in intellectual circles.  The term "fuzzy logic"--coined by Zadeh in the early sixties--is finding its way into sophisticated conversation just as chaos, quantum physics and relativity have in the past.  Fuzzy Logic was the term given to a system of mathematics developed to model the human brain's curious way of processing and selecting words.  "Fuzzy" in this sense means not "either/or" reality, but a state of being arising from a transition or evolution from one state into another. It is a "both/neither" phenomenology.  In classical logic, things are members of an ideal class or category which by definition are not also members of a different class (except, of course, the class of all classes…). Fuzzy Logic is referent to a more complex description of reality wherein things can belong to two different categories simultaneously.
Imagine an automobile undergoing demolition.  We may certainly start out by calling it a "car", but as the demolition proceeds, the "car" is transformed into something else. It has become part "car" and part "not car".  Even though all the parts of the car are still present, it now clearly possesses a more complex state of being.  Fuzzy Logic is what the brain uses to decide what to call such a thing (other than “junk”).  And yet, the descriptive phrase “part car, part not car" is fundamentally imprecise. Zadeh himself was aware of this loss in precision--especially in the use of words to describe complex systems--and led him to formulate his Law of Incompatibility, which states: As complexity rises, precise statements lose meaning and meaningful statements lose precision.
           Fuzzy Logic, being as it is a form of adaptation to a new environment (in this case, a more complex one), is linked to the perception of chaos. As an environment grows in complexity, that is, as both the number of elements comprising the system grows and the number of connections between these elements grows, the potential for interdependent and unpredictable behavior grows as well. Meaning and precision become antagonistic outcomes. Finding Order and Comprehension within this environment becomes imperative to the individual and groups of individuals. The resultant stresses accumulate. Complexity can become a threat.  Survival, our most basic instinct, is at stake. The old ordering paradigms become inadequate or no longer suffice to provide knowledge or control. Enter the perception of Chaos. I do not know which came first: the scientific exploration into chaotic realms, or, the pedestrian apprehension of life-in-disorder. But in either case, the goal is the same: a rational apprehension of a complex world.
          If we consider, additionally, that complexity in systems leads to criticality (see Per Bak and Kan Chen: “Self-Organized Criticality”, Aug., 1991, Sci. Am.)—a state of organization that a system attains in which ‘minor  events’ (crisis states) multiply and can potentially pervade the entire system  resulting in a ‘Major Event’ (a system wide crisis or ‘chaos cascade’)—then we can further understand and rationalize the cognitive link between complexity and chaos. 
         However, despite the expanding research into chaos and the discovery of its curious features (such as Self-Stability and Universality), developing and using a model or paradigm based upon chaos is more than a challenging intellectual endeavor. This is due in part to the fact that there exist many forms of chaotic behavior (geometrical/mathematical/, molecular/biological, etc.) as well as because of the fundamentally complex structuring and functioning of some systems. For many years I toiled to develop one or more chaos models to explain phenomena within such divergent fields as psychology, phenomenology, morphology, evolution (social/biological), learning behavior, and human creativity. In many ways I was successful but in some basic ways I grew frustrated. There was an under-riding sense of explanatory imprecision and incompleteness. I was able to make generalized, meaningful statements about a system (viewed from the “outside”) but perceived strongly that these statements were rather unspecific and imprecise. Saying that the banking system or the weather exhibits positive feedback seemed to be a generally accurate attribution. On the other hand, when I strove to nail down my chaos paradigms with the precise and specific “mechanics” (How does said positive feedback function in a given instance?, for example), I found that a sense of overall applicable meaning was lost (I was “inside” the system, unable to see ‘the forest for the trees’).  My chaos modeling of real-world complex systems became murky in significance—a stimulating exercise in correspondence, perhaps, but seldom a one-to-one, model-to-reality, isomorphism.  Also, I became reminded that I (my mind) was a crucial part of any observable system.  Language, of course, lay at the very heart of the problem—being as it is an often confusing (and imprecise) means of generating descriptive/symbolic analogies of reality (paradigms).  At times I felt like Stephen Crane’s “Man in Pursuit of the Horizon.”
         Then along came Zadeh. Suddenly, I realized the fundamental problem: it is complexity itself that was the cause of my frustration.  Extrapolating from Zadeh, I saw that I could make meaningfully imprecise statements (about the whole system, for example) and less meaningful but precise statements concerning a specific interrelationship. I began to realize that complex interrelationing necessitates the incompatibility principle. For within any complex system, the meaning of any given relationship between elements arises from its relationship to the total system (the so-called Stapp Principle). Complexity is a dynamic and holistic thing.  And it seemed to be, after so much thought, just an exotic example of the old thing-in-itself concept (Hegel's Ding An Sich). Complexity, being as it is a totality which enfolds us as we contribute to it, defies our rational attempts to fully describe it. Complexity can be cruel.
But I wish to bring this high-falootin' intellectualism back down to the social plane. Although I suspect that much of the population does not understand even the rudiments of Complexity--nor does it care to--people nevertheless perceive, if unconsciously, the influences of complexification. Individuals within a society may lack the intellectual constructs to describe what is happening to them, but they can certainly apprehend this uncertain world--psychologically and emotionally.  The expansion of media and technology, the proliferation of faiths, the transformation of economic modes, and the intermingling of cultures are all, to some degree, brought into popular awareness—possibly leaving the individual mind in an alternately confused and reactive state. And every day that passes, the word ‘chaos’ spreads like a virus.
Complexity touches everything.  Some people cope with this by consciously adopting simplicity, a return to a simpler, more “virtuous” way of life.  But what is of special interest to me is the generalized paranoid response to complexity: The Conspiracy Theory.
As I write this essay (Spring, 1997), a standoff is in progress between police and a bare-footed, camouflaged, samurai sword-wielding homeless man.  The standoff has been going on now for over eight hours.  The television brings me live updates every hour.  Everyone wants to know why the police are taking so long--the roadblocks are causing delays and fouled-up plans.  The police are saying that they want to make sure no one gets hurt--meaning themselves as well as the swordsman.  Each hour a new stratagem is put forth: tear gas, rubber bullets, a net, a water canon--but each idea is discarded.  No doubt the police are conscious of the television crews and the public spectacle that has evolved.  I wonder if some strange form of fuzzy logic is now engaged in the minds of those cops.  And the live reports capture the words of the man at the center of it all.  He is conducting a soliloquy of sorts.  I can hear only fragments, but he is speaking in vague and ominous terms of the forces and people who, it seems, have had it in for him.
This is a tragic example of a maladaptive response to complexity. I note it here for its apparent, overt, motivation: the man's ambiguously expressed idea of Conspiracy.  And as extreme as this man's world-image and actions may seem, each of us has entertained a few conspiracy theories of our own.  My personal favorite is the DEA/Pharmaceutical Industry Implementation of the War on Drugs.  The connections are there, yet, also elusive.  I don't have all the facts—the presumably purposeful result of disinformation and powers beyond my scope of experience (All the better to conspire with, my dear!). But we all have them ... U.F.O. Abduction/Autopsy Cover-up, World Bank/Club of Rome/Federal Reserve/ Council on Foreign Relations’ Plot-To-Rule-The-World, or perhaps the garden variety zip code/fluoride-in-the-water conspiracy...
         The main point of all this is that I believe that the para-rational idea of Complexity may in fact be manifesting itself, unconsciously, in the socio-linguistic domain as Conspiracy Theory.  For what is a conspiracy but a shadowy web of inter-cooperating agents and events? It sounds to me like a Complex Adaptive System in action. The conspiracy theorist is struggling to make sense of vaguely perceived connections--connections that must be all linked together within some greater, even nefarious, system. To restate Zadeh’s Law: As complexity rises, so will the number of conspiracy theories to explain it.  The theory itself becomes the gestalt of unconscious complexity anxiety.  It is a source of both fear and comfort to the believer--the result of fuzzy logic in the midst of a chaotic world.  It’s imprecision and meaningfulness is the clue to its source.  Even the generalized paranoia is understandable given the fact that Complexity defies our comprehension and control yet has power and impact in our lives.  The agents of any given conspiracy embody these real-world forces that control and/or manipulate our world.  We fear them,  but we seek also to uncover them.							           
          Logician/Psychologist G. Spencer Brown tells us, “When the present existence ceases to make sense, it can still come to sense again through the realization of its form.” However, our traditional capacities for pattern recognition do not always avail us when it comes to Chaos and Complexity. And so it may be that the form of our present existence is Complexity, but its psychological realization is Conspiracy. 
On occasion, I have thought that the one true conspiracy is the collective desire for conspiracy--the desire to believe in its efficacy.  Belief empowers the object of belief.  Perhaps if we give too much credence to such theories we lose our will to change the world, or, at least, our world-image.  But I am sure it is much more complex than that.
Still, when the conspiracy speculation starts sounding a little too possible, I recall that day in philosophy class when we learned about the Law of Unintentional Consequences--the notion that all actions produce unintentional and unpredictable consequences.  Plans and schemes naturally go awry or result in unforeseeable calamity. Years later, I realized that this was a philosopher's way of acknowledging Chaos' effect on the best laid plans of mice and men ... what then of all these conspiracies?  Are they not likewise subject to the Law of Unintentional Consequences?
	In his remarkable and elegant work "Finite And Infinite Games", philosopher James Carse writes: "Chaos is Nature refusing to obey our expectations." And also, I would add, our conspiracies and  theories.  I take great hope and courage from this.  Perhaps you will too.
All hail Chaos!

MICHAEL ANTHONY RICCIARDI

http://www.chaosmosis.net/Essays.html