Chaos As Social Order

attractor.  Those which do not, not even as museum or tourism curiosities, die out.  The newer practices whose enactment connects exogenous power with indigenous power span the new attractor.  Those which do not are resisted and excluded.  How long is long enough and how far is far enough?  In terms of human living arrangements it is a question of how people use the various kinds of power that are available to them.

            In physical terms, the onset of chaos in physical experiments is reached by means of adding certain kinds of energy to systems–chemical, mechanical, electrical, etc.–that are capable of different regimes of behavior.  These physical systems do not get to chaos by themselves.  They get there by way of receiving and processing energy as the quiescent water described above gets to boiling by receiving and processing thermal energy.  They are physically driven, deterministic systems.  They have regimes of behavior whose characteristics, including transitions to turbulence and to chaos, are determined by manipulation of certain parameters such as temperature, speed of rotation, and voltage.

            Numeric systems are more difficult to describe in concrete terms but they too are deterministic.  In processes such as the generation of the Mandelbrot set or of Feigenbaum’s constant, a finite numerical entity is subjected to repeated recursive layerings or foldings until typically bifurcatory oscillatory behavior occurs.  Again, the numbers do not get to chaos by themselves.  The “energy” of manipu

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