Subject
[NABOKOV-L] [SIGHTING] Novelist and lepidopterist Vladimir...
(2002)
(2002)
From
Date
Body
What Lies Between Order and Chaos? James P. Crutchfield, Santa Fe Institute. March 11, 2002.
cse.ucdavis.edu/~cmg/papers/wlboac.pdf
"Copernicus said that the earth is not the center of the universe; Freud believed that our conscious self is the tip of an unknowable psychological iceberg. Goedel proved that there are limits to logical analysis; Turing, that answers can be beyond our reach; Poincare that determinism leads to unpredictability; and Heisenberg that physical determinism fails on short temporal and small spatial scales.The beautiful irony is that the result of each one of these concessions is an appreciation that the natural world is richer; that it is more structurally complex than we had previously thought. As individuals and as a culture we seem to be continually in a self-generated illusory state: saddled with implicit and naive assumptions about our ability to understand and control nature [.. ]
What lies between order and chaos? The answer now seems remarkably simple: Human innovation. The novelist and lepidopterist Vladimir Nabokov* appreciated more deeply, than many, the origins of creativity in this middle, human ground: There is, it would seem, in the dimensional scale of the world a kind of delicate meeting place between imagination and knowledge, a point, arrived at by diminishing large things and enlarging small ones, that is intrinsically artistic."
* Nabokov, V. V. Speak Memory: An Autobiography Revisited. New York: Everymans Library, 1999.
..........................................................................
Other excerpts:
"What is a pattern? How do we come to recognize patterns that we've never seen before? Formalizing and quantifying the notion of pattern and the process of pattern discovery go right to the heart of scientific practice. Over the last several decades science's view of nature's lack of structure, its unpredictability underwent a major renovation with the discovery of deterministic chaos. Behind the veil of apparent randomness, many processes are highly ordered, following simple rules..."
"Natural language itself shows a balance between order and randomness.On the one hand, there is a need for static structures, such as a vocabulary and
a grammar, so that two people can communicate. Without a prior agreement on these there is no basis for understanding; each and every utterance would be unintelligible to the listener...On the other hand, there would be no need to communicate if spoken utterances were completely predictable by the listener. In this case the language would be a rigidly fixed structure with all possible sentences uniquely identified and identifiable. But humans use language (typically) to communicate new information of facts, ideas, feelings, and other states of mind. And so, there must be an unknown or unexpected element in communication as far as the listener is concerned, if they are to stay engaged. Then again the "new" element cannot be so dominant that the result is a jumble of phonemes, words, and sentences. Natural language as a changeable and dynamic system must be a balance of new information unpredictable by the listener and of order so that communication is understandable...British philosopher Alfred North Whitehead comments on the interplay of order and chaos in art: 'The same principle is exhibited by the tedium arising from the unrelieved dominance of fashion in art...It seems as though the last delicacies of feeling require some element of novelty to relieve their massive inheritance from bygone system.' Order is not su±cient. What is required, is something much more complex. It is order entering upon novelty; so that the massiveness of order does not degenerate into mere repetition; and so that the novelty is always reflected upon a background of system."
My chosen quote (from Pale Fire): "Life Everlasting - based on a misprint!/ I mused as I drove homeward: take the hint,/ And stop investigating my abyss?"
btw: a random find (perhaps only new to me): Is the name Vivian (Vivian Darkbloom) not only a part of the overall anagram (Vladimir Nabokov), but inspired by the sound of Nabokov's initials VVN?
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cse.ucdavis.edu/~cmg/papers/wlboac.pdf
"Copernicus said that the earth is not the center of the universe; Freud believed that our conscious self is the tip of an unknowable psychological iceberg. Goedel proved that there are limits to logical analysis; Turing, that answers can be beyond our reach; Poincare that determinism leads to unpredictability; and Heisenberg that physical determinism fails on short temporal and small spatial scales.The beautiful irony is that the result of each one of these concessions is an appreciation that the natural world is richer; that it is more structurally complex than we had previously thought. As individuals and as a culture we seem to be continually in a self-generated illusory state: saddled with implicit and naive assumptions about our ability to understand and control nature [.. ]
What lies between order and chaos? The answer now seems remarkably simple: Human innovation. The novelist and lepidopterist Vladimir Nabokov* appreciated more deeply, than many, the origins of creativity in this middle, human ground: There is, it would seem, in the dimensional scale of the world a kind of delicate meeting place between imagination and knowledge, a point, arrived at by diminishing large things and enlarging small ones, that is intrinsically artistic."
* Nabokov, V. V. Speak Memory: An Autobiography Revisited. New York: Everymans Library, 1999.
..........................................................................
Other excerpts:
"What is a pattern? How do we come to recognize patterns that we've never seen before? Formalizing and quantifying the notion of pattern and the process of pattern discovery go right to the heart of scientific practice. Over the last several decades science's view of nature's lack of structure, its unpredictability underwent a major renovation with the discovery of deterministic chaos. Behind the veil of apparent randomness, many processes are highly ordered, following simple rules..."
"Natural language itself shows a balance between order and randomness.On the one hand, there is a need for static structures, such as a vocabulary and
a grammar, so that two people can communicate. Without a prior agreement on these there is no basis for understanding; each and every utterance would be unintelligible to the listener...On the other hand, there would be no need to communicate if spoken utterances were completely predictable by the listener. In this case the language would be a rigidly fixed structure with all possible sentences uniquely identified and identifiable. But humans use language (typically) to communicate new information of facts, ideas, feelings, and other states of mind. And so, there must be an unknown or unexpected element in communication as far as the listener is concerned, if they are to stay engaged. Then again the "new" element cannot be so dominant that the result is a jumble of phonemes, words, and sentences. Natural language as a changeable and dynamic system must be a balance of new information unpredictable by the listener and of order so that communication is understandable...British philosopher Alfred North Whitehead comments on the interplay of order and chaos in art: 'The same principle is exhibited by the tedium arising from the unrelieved dominance of fashion in art...It seems as though the last delicacies of feeling require some element of novelty to relieve their massive inheritance from bygone system.' Order is not su±cient. What is required, is something much more complex. It is order entering upon novelty; so that the massiveness of order does not degenerate into mere repetition; and so that the novelty is always reflected upon a background of system."
My chosen quote (from Pale Fire): "Life Everlasting - based on a misprint!/ I mused as I drove homeward: take the hint,/ And stop investigating my abyss?"
btw: a random find (perhaps only new to me): Is the name Vivian (Vivian Darkbloom) not only a part of the overall anagram (Vladimir Nabokov), but inspired by the sound of Nabokov's initials VVN?
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/