Time&Eternity

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ontological, i.e., the processes in question exhibit a behavior that is similar
to that described by chaos theory, without following this theory in a strict
sense. In medicine, it is claimed that chaos theory has led to true intellectual
progress in the understanding of adaptive systems (systems that react
flexibly to changes in the environment). Concepts that are oriented toward
holistic medicine are familiar with the description of health as a delicate
balance between order and chaos. An excess of order leads to sclerotic
changes; too much disorder leads to disintegration. However, critical voices
believe that chaos theory fails when it comes to describing the actual evolutionary
creative processes. 298
Whatever the case may be, the understanding of life as a dissipative
structure has contributed to the liberation of scientific knowledge from
mechanistic reduction. Thus, chaos research can help us understand, for example,
the fact that a person’s EEG exhibits a chaotic progression during
normal thought processes but is regular during an epileptic seizure. Similarly,
a healthy heart does not beat in a mechanically uniform manner; it
pumps the blood through the body in a chaotic rhythm: A healthy heart
dances; a dying one marches. 299
Chaos research attempts to account for the complexity of natural forms.
Using fractal geometry, it draws conclusions from the fact that Euclidian
geometry can be applied only to idealized, simple forms, while nature is
constructed in a much more complicated fashion: Mountains are not cones
and clouds are not balls; the coastlines of islands do not form circles and the
courses of rivers do not form straight lines. 300 Chaos theory makes clear that
the “dogma” of the strong causality of deterministic systems, which successfully
contributed to the knowledge of the world and the control of nature
for a long time, actually applies only to a small portion of what is otherwise
a highly complex, nonlinear natural order. With regard to the extremely
sensitive evolutionary processes that make up the majority of life’s processes,
one can speak only of a weak causality.
The understanding of complexity is one of the greatest challenges that
confronts science; in the eyes of some, it is even the challenge. 301 In a certain
sense, we see here the counterbalance to the efforts of physics to find a theory
of everything. While one is basically dealing with a reductionist attempt
in the “Theory of Everything” because it seeks to reduce the complicated to
a single principle, complexity research requires more of a holistic perspective
because it deals with such multilayered concepts as life, consciousness,
and intelligence. 302 The goal of the TOE is to reduce the many into one;
complexity research attempts to understand the emergence of the many.
According to one definition (but not the only possible one), “Complexity
is the study of the behaviour of macroscopic collections of such units