Renaissance 2.0 Domestication of Chaos (Unexpected Uncertainty)

“In a work of art, chaos must shimmer through the veil of order.”

― Novalis

Steven Pinker proclaims the coming of the New Enlightenment. He states that by the laws of probability decay of our civilisation into chaos would be the most probable outcome without intervention of human intelligence. “We need to concentrate our efforts on how things can go right,” he says.

I strongly support his point of view. Yet I believe that the New Renaissance should begin before the New Enlightenment. Art should come first because it appeals to the reckless part of our brain that is responsible for making decisions.

(Clarification 1: Dear neuroscientists and psychologists, please, forgive my poor translation of your language. For those who wish to learn more about the theory of entropic brain I recommend this paper in Frontiers in Neuroscience to begin with and the fresher one in Nature on the same subject)

Our brain has two parts: reckless and reasonable. They work in concert but are highly specialised. The reckless part faces the chaos of the world, relentlessly scans it for patterns and computes probabilities. It is responsible for emotions, intuition and decision making. The reasonable part puts numbers and words together so that they can make sense. It elaborates explanations to the decisions made by the reckless part. It speaks. It acts as an interface of people communications. It also is relentlessly telling and retelling the story of our life.

(Clarification 2: I use the word ‘chaos’ in this article in the meaning of ‘complete disorder and confusion’ not in the meaning used for chaotic systems in the theory of chaos in math and physics. The term I should be using is ‘unexpected uncertainty’ that seemes to heavy for this text. I also like the word chaos.)

The reckless part explores chaos. The reasonable part maintains order.

The reckless part acquires new knowledge. The reasonable part puts old knowledge at work.

The reckless part means plasticity. The reasonable part means stiffness.

Motivation comes from the reckless part. The reasonable part takes care of execution.

Authentic art domesticates chaos. Like a wildfire, wild chaos kills. Domesticated chaos enlightens. Domestication of chaos was, probably, a much bigger human feat than even domestication of fire because domesticated chaos enlightened our soul while domesticated fire enlightened only our dwelling. Cro-Magnons, humans with the biggest brain, were among the first to accomplish the feat of domestication of chaos when they carved pictures of animals on the walls of their caves.

Art appeals to the reckless part of our brain. Science talks the language of the reasonable part (although we need the reckless part to acquire new knowledge). Renaissance is about art. Enlightenment is about science. That’s why the New Renaissance should come first and it should deliver art, not talk about science.

We play the game of chaos but we call it the game of humanity because love and hate, fear and passion, cruelty and tenderness — all human feelings emerge from the reckless part of our brain. The reckless part of our brain has been too much suppressed by the reasonable part for far too long. Therefore it needs a refreshing dose of chaos to regain the ability to distinct good from evil even under the most ambiguous conditions… and to get ready to acquire the new knowledge of the New Enlightenment as well.

Over several centuries up to now humans were over obsessed with machines. Machines were making our environment more predictable. We began to adapt to it. By mastering skills and developing habits we became semi-automatic ourselves. However, a full automation of humanity is not an option because any, even the best tuned, machine is too rigid and fragile to actively withstand decay. It can only delay it for sometime.

Life actively withstands decay into chaos. Our brain needs to explore chaos and to model it to better predict what we as living organisms have to do to withstand our decay. As a society we need to embrace the notion of chaos, to domesticate it in a certain way so that we can collectively and actively withstand decay.

Renaissance was, probably, the most reckless abandon in the history of human civilisation… so far. It used domesticated chaos to open minds of people to new ideas. Magic folk tales became the most simple and yet the most effective tool of Renaissance because they popularised and brought pieces of domesticated chaos to all palaces of the rich and to all huts of the poor alike. We are inspired by fairy tales and wish to make a tool that will be both popular and authentic as them. This time we also wish to create a source of artificial chaos instead of its domestication by art because even art in our civilisation of machines became way too predictable to capture chaos.

Now, with recent breakthroughs in AI and computational neuroscience, we can make machines, which embrace chaos to withstand decay, instead of turning ourselves into machines.