The Collected Papers of Emmanuel Ghent by Victoria Demos Adrienne Harris & Victoria Demos & Adrienne Harris

Author:Victoria Demos,Adrienne Harris & Victoria Demos & Adrienne Harris
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781317404774
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd

Chapter 5

The butterfly in the consulting room

Barry Magid

In this, his last published paper, Ghent attempted a radical re-thinking of our basic analytic metaphors, inspired by the revolution in developmental systems theory of Esther Thelen and the neurobiology of Gerald Edelman’s Neural Darwinism. Edelman and Thelen were part of a larger paradigm shift that included new, mathematically rigorous theories of chaos theory (Lorenz, 1972) and fractal geometry (Mandelbrot, 1983). This shift can be dated back to 1972, when meteorologist Edward Lorenz gave a lecture entitled “Predictability: Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?” which was the starting point of what became known as the famous butterfly effect.

Progress in the sciences is usually thought of in terms of research and the acquisition of new data. However, the greatest impact of a scientific discovery may be how it reshapes our metaphorical view of ourselves and our world. It made no practical difference whatsoever to Renaissance man whether the earth revolved around the sun or vice versa; it made an enormous difference whether he, and his Church, saw himself as the center of God’s universe or whether he was a de-centered occupant of an infinite cosmos indifferent to his existence. This shift in perspective is, on the one hand, a shift in the understanding of the basic causal mechanisms at work in the universe; on the other, it involves a shift of meaning, the substitution of one explanatory frame for another. When we speak of causes, we are inclined towards a mechanistic and deterministic picture of events; the realm of meaning, however, brings us back to a sense of human agency and the possibility of alternate stories, by which we can make sense of our experience. A purely Newtonian picture of causality seems to preclude the possibility of free will and agency; the world of reasons and meanings is reduced to the totally deterministic language of physics. The only alternative appears for us to act as if the mind operates in a separate sphere of freedom, across a Cartesian divide designed to allow mind and will to be somehow transcendentally free of their physical constraints.

However, with the advent of what became known as dynamic systems theory, a model of recursive systems and emergent properties was proposed as an alternative to linear, teleological and causal systems, and the old Newtonian “billiard ball” model of causality was itself shown to be a picture that very poorly approximated how nature works. Physical systems were no longer paradigms of determinism and predictability; rather, randomness, complexity and unpredictability were shown to be irreducibly part of the natural world.

Along with Lorenz and his followers, Benoit Mandelbrot’s The Fractal Geometry of Nature (1983) provided the mathematical basis for complexity theory that in many ways underpins Thelen and Edelman’s work in biology and neurology. Mandelbrot wrote, “Classical mathematics had its roots in the regular geometric structures of Euclid and the continuously evolving dynamics of Newton.” Nature, however, as Mandelbrot was to show, was intrinsically

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