Chaos in Psychology
Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about something that comes to my mind from time to time. That is, the relation of physics and mathematics with psychology. I have always been a firm believer that mathematics and physics are really the basis of everything and that psychology should have as its goal the unification with these two sciences. However, psychology was never in very good terms with either. The explanation that most people give is that psychology is so complex and unpredictable that mathematics can’t really explain it. But I always believed that we just hadn’t advanced enough, and that the solution will someday be found. I found this link in Psychology Today and it all came to my mind again.
New Physics + New Psychology = New Questions
It’s written by Dr. David Pincus, whose I admit to have become a great fan of. He has written an excellent three articles series concerning the connection between chaos theory and the Dark Knight (Chaos Theory and Batman: The Dark Knight Part I, Chaos Theory and Batman Part II, Chaos theory and Batman: Part III). His blog, The Chaotic Life, deals with "patterns and randomness in how we live‘. He has also contributed in a book I’m hoping to buy and deals with some of the issues we will discuss today: Chaos and Complexity in Psychology - The Theory of Nonlinear Dynamical Systems. In this article he discusses his thoughts on a book called The non-local universe: The new physics and matters of the mind.
He presents ideas like the ability of some particles to remain united even when they are seperated by infinite distances, or even time. Other, freaky subjects include how the future can change the past or particles that appear only if you observe them simultaneously at two or more exact points and how the american goverment uses them to encrypt information.
What I found most interesting, however, was something I had thought myself previously, too. This is the possibility that the universe is conscious, which could be explained if we saw EVERYTHING in the universe as a fractal system (a system into a system into a system into a system ad infinitum). If that was the case, then we could theorize that just as our consciousness arises from the complexity of a certain system (our brain), that is based on neurons and particles and so on, even though the particles and the neurons themselves are not conscious, then we could theorize that we represent particles that constitute to the complexity of a higher system that it’s conscious at its own level, without us realizing it.
"If the universe is a seamlessly interactive system that evolves to higher levels of complexity and if the lawful regularities of this universe are emergent properties of this system, we can assume that the cosmos is a single significant whole that evinces progressive order in complementary relation to its parts. Given that this whole exists in some sense within all parts (quanta), one can then argue that it operates in self-reflective fashion and is the ground for all emergent complexity. Since human consciousness evinces self-reflective awareness in the human brain and since this brain (like all physical phenomena) can be viewed as an emergent property of the whole, it is not unreasonable to conclude, in philosophical terms at least, that the universe is conscious.
But since the actual character of this seamless whole cannot be represented or reduced to its parts, it lies, quite literally, beyond all human representations or descriptions. If one chooses to believe that the universe is a self-reflective and self-organizing whole, this lends no support whatsoever to conceptions of design, meaning, purpose….On the other hand, it is no longer possible to argue that a profound sense of unity with the whole, which has long been understood as the foundation of religious experience, can be dismissed, undermined, or invalidated with appeals to scientific knowledge.
….It now seems clear that this radical separation between mind and world was a macro-level illusion fostered by limited awareness of the actual character of physical reality and by mathematical idealizations that were extended beyond the realm of their applicability."
Of course this could lead to a panpsychism, and we could deduce that if we constitute particles of some higher consciousness, maybe our neurons are conscious, too. Things like these can really blow your mind.
What really intriques me is a certain characteristic of the universe: its repeated use of patterns. For example, I was thinking the other day, how the way that bees defend their hive (sacrifising their lives), resembles the way that white cells work, or the way that Kamikaze worked. Perhaps, I’m going a little too far here, but maybe I’m not. But, anyway, who knows? It seems that we are at the beginning of a new paradigm shift in psychology that will incorporate chaos theory in psychology. The only thing that we can surely say is that things are going to get even more interesting down the road 
