Complexity as a disease

I was thinking about chaos today.  Chaos theory, complexity theory, emergence theory, all that shit amounts to patterns within chaos (at least it does to those of us with brains incapable of accurate mathematics).  Things as we see them are not the sum of their parts.  I am not the sum of atoms and electrons and molecules and proteins and cells and organs and whatever.  I as an entity emerge from those things.

Complex entities have two important properties.  First, they are robust: they can handle a lot of shit (like the crazed, Kali wielding Scotsman of "Cats in a Sack") without apparent dysfunction.  The second property is called the tipping point: the complex system that hides the dysfunction from our eyes/ears/nose/throat/touch becomes saturated.  The dysfunction then becomes immediately apparent.

The key is things as we see them.  There is a lot of ego tied up in concepts of chaos.  I can't comprehend it, so it must be chaotic.  This of course is not the case.  The pattern is there from the beginning.  Our inability to perceive it is a function of our dysfunction: we lack the capability.  Chaos is inherent in us.  It is not external.  

The opposite is true as well.  Coherence is internal.  Patterns don't exist outside our consciousness.  Chaos and coherence are labels like dog, cat, human.  This makes it interesting.  Coherence is in our heads, but lack of coherence is a defect in our heads; it is a limit to our perception and understanding. Following this logic (if you can call it that), we can't figure out our own heads.  My mind labels certain systems as a pattern.  I "can't" label certain systems as a pattern, not because I can't "see" it, but because I can't create it.  This makes us entirely responsible for the coherence of our environment.  I am the master of my own chaos or the lack there of.  

Disease is chaos.  It has a million little pieces that, when confronting it personally and directly, are impossible to grasp.  As physicians, we eliminate the chaos by creating patterns: congestive heart failure, diabetes, arthritis, cancer.  These are all labels and patterns.  And they are created in our minds as physicians.  But the pattern you create as the patient may differ.  Regardless, I direct you through my system of patterns, my coherence.  I make it so you are no longer the master of your own chaos.  

Echos from my heart (yeah I vomited in my mouth a little too)

Part of my job is to read echocardiograms: ultrasound images of the moving heart.  The machine sends out sound waves which bounce off an object (red blood cell, cardiac cell, polish sausage if you're Chris Farley) and returns.  The machine measures how long it takes for the return trip and calculates the position of the object.  It then marks it with a dot on a screen.  Movement is simulated by the temporal coordination of flashing dots (in other words the movement is in my head and not on the screen).

What my patients see are flashing dots with a fuzzy 2D animation of something.  The most adroit may even see some semblance of a heart.  What my residents see are isolated images of various aspects of a poorly defined organ.  What I see is a detailed map of the heart laid out in 3D outlining subtle normalities and abnormalities.  I tell my residents that it isn't really something I can teach.  You see enough and you just kind of get it.  Like an autostereogram in which you are looking at a bunch of wavy lines then, magically, a boob pops out (you're probably wondering where I found my autostereograms and what exactly the "auto" part stands for).  Or like the dirty, smelly guys with the shitty lives because they saw no "honor" in living life as a lie in the Matrix (I would have taken the blue pill) who could see Keanu's crappy acting and clumsy karate on a screen that the rest of us only saw 1s and 0s.

The point is there is something intangible - even unintelligible - to our perception.  Take a book for example.  A series of dots make up what you perceive as a letter that, when strung together with other dot-laden letters, forms a word then a sentence, a paragraph, a chapter, and a book.  But it is all a series of dots whether its this bullshit blog or the bible.  Perception is interpretation; the two are inextricably linked.  The fallout of this is objectivity is impossible (at least how we commonly define it).  Our knowledge is based on error prone perception (sorry Plato, but I fall on the "nuture" side of nature vs. nuture when it comes to knowledge; action is a different story entirely).  The scientific method is empirical at it's heart.  So the "medical method" is as well and therefore must be equally as subjective.  (Shit, thanks to Einstein we can't even agree on time and space!)  When I take care of you as your physician, your disease and its treatment do not live in an objective world.  I can't tell you is true.  I can only tell you what fits our shared subjectivity.

Pattern recognition and an identity crisis

What the fuck am I? (Too many "fuck"s in this blog? It just works so well at getting readers...) You'll definitely notice an identity crisis weaving it's way through these entries. I guess it's not so much a crisis as I am content with not ever finding out who or what I am. I do believe, however, that the search is a necessary and vital process. In other words, my identity - my life for that matter - is boiled down to a fruitless search. In order to prevent utter personal chaos, the process then has to be the goal. And since meaning is a human construct (yes, I will be serving drinks and similar bits of bullshit wisdom in hell) and a rite of consciousness (more nails in the a-religious coffin), brain-chaos-containment is meaning.  So, Aristotelian logic leads us directly to the idea that I have discovered the meaning of life: process not achievement. The world is now saved. You're welcome America (standard hilarious Will Ferrell).

But back to question at hand: what the fuck am I?  Phenomenology has us bracket our perceptual habits and start fresh (more on phenomenology when I know what the hell I'm talking about).  So starting fresh: I am atoms.  I am carbon; I am oxygen; I am hydrogen; and I am sprinkles of other molecular crap.  The table my computer sits on (I won't discuss the computer itself because I don't pretend to understand whatever magic the Warlock Jobs used to create it) is also made of similar, if not identicle, molecular crap.  So what am I in relation to it?  I am exactly that: a relationship.  When I see myself in the mirror, I am looking at the same particles as I see in a cat, or a table, or tree.  I am different because of the relationship of those particles.  I am a pattern, not a substance.

What does this mean?  I am a construct of my mind.  My brain interprets the relationships and creates me or the table or the tree.  I don't exist as I think I exist outside of my head.  So what the fuck am I?  I am whatever my mind wants me to be.