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A special welcome to our incoming IB Grade X1 class, who are already working with teachers on our Pre- IB Introductory Course. ALL STU...
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Each Grade 11 Student will post 100-150 words as Personal Reflection inspired by their visit to the Art Exhibition. Our Central Knowledge ...
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Grade 11 TOK Class of Mr C will post a short paragraph as update of progress: What topic and page are you working on - What is the ...
The most intriguing point that arose in this video was the link drawn between Order and Chaos. Order being something that follows a pattern, organization and arrangement whereas Chaos may be defined as something that is quite the opposite of Order - unpredictable, portraying disorganization and disorder. However, this very connection raises very important knowledge questions : With what certainty can we say that Order and Chaos are linked together? Is it possible that Chaos may lead to Order? In this case, let’s take the Butterfly Effect as an example. This Effect states that minute changes made in the past may have heavy impacts on the future. Another way of interpreting this Effect may be that simple changes made in the initial stages may end up producing a pattern in all the randomness. This is one of the main reasons why I really enjoyed this video since by joining two extreme terms like Order and Chaos, it pushes all the limits of our knowledge and questions how we really know what we know.
ReplyDeletePaul Auster talks about chance to be the "mechanics of reality" according to me chance is a part of chaos, as chaos can be described to be unexpected and sudden. the opposite of this is order and order has a sense of certainty to it. according to Auster there are only two certainties in life- birth and death. he describes all the events that are a part of our life to be left upto. chance. this creates a sense of chaos in our lives. his story about the lightening bolt was a great example of chance, and how chance as an identity has the ability to influence our lives in different ways. chance is closely associated with math and sometimes luck. according to me, the numbers were in his favour in this incident, as the probability of the lightning bolt striking him was negligible. this also shows how one event can affect an individual and influence his life in different ways. The fact that chaos and order exist at the same time makes this video extremely interesting and the concept beautiful.
ReplyDeleteI'd like to start by thank sir for this extremely important and knowledgable post.
ReplyDeleteI base my comment on Paul Auster's quote "the mechanics of reality". His personal experience can actually give us all an idea that everything has uncertainty. I was so surprised by the fact that he was untouched by the lightening bolt, that I asked Mr. Navroz if there's a link between uncertainty and mathematics. He gave a few cards to all of us and guessed what the total number of outcomes accordingly for each would be, and he was very close to that answer even before the game started. The answer we got was 1.25 and the answer he guessed before we started, and wrote in a piece of paper in front of our eyes was 1.3. Just a minimal difference, but there's still uncertainty involved. You do not always achieve a definite answer for all your questions in mathematics as an area of knowledge. The idea of chaos playing a consistent role in our lives, and the theory of chance makes a very clear and strong conceptual framework which one can use as a mean for obtaining answers. It's a really beautiful video.
As it is said there is order in chaos and the beauty in this is that something so contrasting can be linked together so easily and the fact that we see is that there are two sides of the same coin. It can be said that where there is order there will always be chaos. This brought a paradox in my mind that can there ever be total order or chaos or will the other be erased without the existence of the other. When we see things the bigger picture we may miss out the finer details and what may look peaceful may really not be so. Hence appearances may be deceptive and wherever there is order there will always be chaos and in chaos we may see a thing as beautiful as the order causing it.
ReplyDeleteIt was interesting to see Mr. Paul Auster talk about how one simple incident, a result of chance, impacted his entire life. On the other hand, the song talks about playing life as a game. This simple contrast between holding the cards and being almost ruthlessly subject to the whims of fate is delightful. We have choice and free will to influence events around us and yet our ability to make these choices is so precariously balanced. The entire situation is completely absurdist. I encountered a similar puzzle when reading ‘A Hero of Our Time’ for English class. If this is so, to what extent are we responsible for our choices and their consequences?
ReplyDeleteAlso, the butterfly effect examined the unpredictability of events. Its importance heavily relied on the fact that events could be explained in hindsight but could rarely be predicted in foresight. Then, is the difference between chaos and order simply an illusion? I don’t think anything can be completely random. There must have been a chain of events, however small and inconsequential in the immediate environment, that eventually led to the particular event. Chaos could then be interpreted as just something we can’t order, consisting of a pattern invisible to the observer. Thus, only the perception of the observer is relevant to the difference between chaos and order.
The first video about change and chaos has an interesting perspective on life. The man in the video says that life is unpredictable from the day you're born to the day you die, this is obvious shared knowledge because truthfully, anything can happen. After the man experienced his friend dying because of a lightning bolt right in front of him, through emotion and reason as a way of knowing he started embracing the fact that life can change any minute.
ReplyDeleteThe video of the Butterfly Effect by BBC uses the areas of knowledge Mathematics and The Natural Sciences to explain how everything that seems like chaos actually does have patterns. Using sense perception we can see the visual impact of a match stick on a feedback template. It first has order then it loses order but eventually gains order back because of the patterns. This hints that everything that happens isn't actually random we just perceive it to be.
Through the chaos theory, science has discovered that order and chaos can both originate from the same source. This is interesting to me because it shows us the closeness between two ideas that we would otherwise consider to be binary opposites. This theory also displays how small changes that one would view as negligible have the power to completely alter the outcome of an event – to decide whether it ends in chaos or order.
ReplyDeleteLife is uncertain. This is a statement that many people tend to use often. Paul Auster's childhood experience led him to this statement. As human beings, we tend to make rules and beliefs that revolve around our daily lives in order to produce an explanation on things we are uncertain about. Uncertainty is something that is found everywhere. Certainty is an important aspect to look into in Tok as we question the validity and stem of knowledge. This is particularly important when focusing in on religious knowledge systems. Everything we learn about our culture and religion, from childhood, is through the people we are surrounded by. However, as we grow up we eventually question the certainty of the beliefs we had surrounded ourselves with.
ReplyDeleteIn the second video, the secret life of chaos, what interested me the most was the statement 'natural world could be deeply, profoundly unpredictable but the very same things that make it unpredictable also allow it to create pattern and structure'. This statement is intriguing as we realise that the unpredictability of life and a patterned form of it are both stemmed from the same thing. The statement is an interesting one that makes one ponder over the beauty of such a phenomenon.
Both the videos were very interesting and are successful in arising questions and thoughts within me that would help me connect it with many aspects of Tok.
In the first video Paul Auster said that “chance is a part of our unexpected reality.” He brought to light the general facts of life that anything can happen to anyone at any time and that life is chaotic .He connected the dots between chance and fate two things that are generally considered to be opposite. On the other hand, the second video brought out the relationship between chaos and order which is very similar to the concept that Paul Auster explained . However , the difference between the two videos is that in the first video emotion was used as a way of knowing and in the second video, reason and knowledge were used as ways of knowing.
ReplyDeleteI thoroughly enjoyed the video on chance and order, and found the binary opposition between the two quite intriguing - especially since the video propagated the notion that chaos and order originate from the same source. I found the section on the butterfly effect truly riveting, as it enforced and provided evidence for the claim that chaos does indeed form a pattern that can have life-long implications, such as in Mr. Auster's case. I liked the idea that a small, seemingly minuscule decision can have an impact that may plausibly alter the entire sequence of a person's life, and I found that it drew an existential parallel to the idea of the nihilistic notion of the inconsequentialness of humankind in the grand scale of the universe, as it provides a counterargument to the idea of the futility of seemingly trivial actions and by extension, the futility of human life itself. We inherently retain the free will to act as we desire, yet the capability we possess to make our own decisions is compromised by our inability to accept the outcomes of our actions.
ReplyDeletePaul Auster makes his point of "how unstable is everything is" and I understood from the video that it is very important to realise the uncertain nature of life but till a limit. He uses his memory of an emotion that he experienced during the unfortunate calamity that he had closely witnessed to develop a reason for the possibility and uncertainty. I believe that if we understand the uncertainty that every action of our may have, how unstable our lives can become within a blink of an eye then we will become way more cautious in the way we deal with our life. This extreme cautious may not let us do what we wish to because the unpredictability of our actions will constantly keep reminding us of situations we do not want to be in. If such happens then we may be like machines, doing only a limited amount of work being extremely orderly. However in the last video we learn that order and chaos have a profound relation and how order causes chaos. Just like the experiment with the camera and the screen with multiple images forming I realised and came up with a knowledge question "how extreme order can create a chaos?" I will use mathematics to explore this question. Lets take an example of a very basic mathematic sum
ReplyDelete100-100 divided by 100-100
an ideal answer would be zero, and that is the way we are taught it. Hence an order is made in the way we think, however if we use a common multiple of 10 in the denominator and the expansion formula in the numerator we get an answer of 2. This creates chaos as we are not taught what we are doing and we come up with something that is interpreted by us. This is small example if these implications are applied in the real world then imagine we will have so many derivations of an event creating chaos. (Thank God we are in the phase where order is still strong ) Hence i believe that if we are taught from an early stage that order is something open to interpretation, and it is not mandatory to follow those lines then in the future we will not have to face the chaos of people who had followed order revolting to find their voice creating chaos. Thats why I said "till a certain limit"
The video on chaos and the butterfly effect really made me ponder on the fact that within definitive subjects like the sciences there is a deceptive section that is often not looked at which is chaos that represents all the imperfections within the perfect. Order and chaos originate from the same sources however order is the one that is more widely accepted and structured(has fixed patterns) on the other hand chaos redefines the limit and complexity of the sciences and mathematics. This video gave me valuable insight into the "order that is laid out by nature and the consequences that can be caused due the butterfly effect." Also the mere coexistence of order and chaos proposes an extremely interesting aspect of chaos theory, of how small changes in the order of nature can completely cause change/ alter events due to the presence of chaos.
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