Chaos theory in the social imagination...

Its been said that scientists had long turned a blind eye to the unpredictable nature of nature. Why? Because, there was a common idea among a majority of 'scientists' that everything that was observed/happened was due to predictable patterns. 

And, well there are such patterns including those in social behavior an outcome of the social imagination... after all, there is nothing new under the sun. But, some thought they saw unpredictability in nature (wonder what that would be like, observing unpredictability) and so, they said what we thought of as predictable was not really 'real'. That's a slippery slope!

Henri Poincare, a physicist, thought he had turned the scientific world on its head. He observed that even seemingly insignificant (and seemingly simple) systems could produce very complex and confounding behaviors. But, was he really seeing simple systems? Perhaps, those 'simple' systems were more complex than he had initially thought/imagined...socially imagined. One's thought patterns are not isolated but socially complex.  

You see, man's understanding of complexity is limited by his own complexity. The human body appears to be simply an eating/eliminating organic machine bumping around at large negatively effecting most things in its environment; but, it is more than that. At the cell level we discover nano-machines in cells, codes and operations. 

Anyway, later on, scientists invented a name for what Poincare observed: the butterfly effect. This idea says that a small change in one place and moment of time (such as a butterfly flapping its wings) can lead to an outrageous effect at another place and time (such as a typhoon).   

Well, but who could really say that it was a single butterfly flapping that caused such an outcome? They could not and so the butterfly effect is a conversational past time.
Because, if it were true, the world would be so incredible chaotic, we would never be able to say anything about what is happening right in front of our eyes; nor agree on what we see as anything that could be understood as 'real'. 

In social sciences, chaos theory is the study of the way that things and people interact. What they agree on through interaction determines what is real for them ... this takes place in the social imagination. The connections and interactions between people in a place over time is what generates society.  

Chaos theory does not assume that there is an absolute perfection in anything; but it does recognize that there is a complicated order to everything, or that all systems will eventually be made predictable with near complete accuracy. 

This theory aims for finding a general order for social behavior observed through interaction and their outcomes (what is agreed on) which do create patterns of behavior.  

So, effectively, there is no 'chaos' but a complicated order to everything... especially when we consider the social imagination which itself is abstract and abstractly complicated for it is grounded in space and time but only because those who apply it (in the locus of their mind) do so in an agreed upon space which is ultimately information taken in through interaction in a place over time.

*the title of the photo used is: Brain interfacing...