Quote:
Erick Mead wrote:
My sense is that if I wish to be in the center, I should simply -- be in the center. I have found that the more I try to distinguish the center from where I am, the further it seems from me.
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Dang edit limit -- I didn't finish. Anyway, here it is:
To put it in abstract terms, anyone who has seen a chaotic Lorenz attractor (the butterfly-like picture)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorenz_attractor , would undertand that the "center" is only the "basin" of the attractor where the current state of the system is organized -- around one of the two orbits (wings) of the butterfly. Chaotic attractors shift from centering on one basin of attraction to the other from exceedingly tiny differences in initial conditions. Arbitrarily large changes in variable can still be oriented around either attractor basin because of very small differences in values clustered around the new quantitative level. Fine qualitative differences are therefore far more critical than gross or large quantative changes in determining the center of the attractor at any given moment.