Tuesday, April 27, 2004

At the beginning was chaos
That is a more acceptable theory, and also more in line with the norse myth of creation, than having a conscious mind out there creating everything. A cow licking a frosted, salty rock causing life sounds a little like butterflies causing storms, and chaos is definitely a powerful actor in all of the norse myths, represented by Loke, the advocate of all things unpredictable.

Chaos connected to creativity thus has a mythic or religious connection. The strong mathematical nature of Chaos theory makes it rather inaccessible to us of a more humanistic bent. Even the Chaos Hypertextbook is beyond true understanding. Knowing the theories of hypertexts does not help, and reader-response theory only tells me that no, I am not the model reader of this! I could of course see if it helps with a Master's degree from Western Sydney in Complexity, Chaos and Creativity. One of the courses is called Use of Narratology in Dealing with Social Complexity, and sounds like part of an argument raging in groups I know fairly well.

What I am looking at chaos and creativity for right now, is that I think that a lot of the patterns and structures we see emerge in multi-user computer games might be better explained through chaos: emergence of logic and results from the random acts of multitudes. I just don't understand the theory properly yet. Not at all, really. But that's pretty chaotic and in the spirit of random acts from which meaning emerges - me thinking about using chaos theory to study games is as effective as a cow licking a frosted stone to create life. But Audhumla did it.

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