David Peat

134 From Certainty to Uncertaintydisturbing it. As in Laplace’s fantasy of being present at the creation ofthe universe, such beings are omniscient to the point where they cangather complete and total information about a system. They possesscomputers of infinite power, computers the size of the universe itself,that enable them to understand the inner workings of that same universe.But we are finite creatures. Total knowledge and predictive powerwill always be beyond us. We have to accept that we can never know theuniverse fully and totally. We must learn to live with a measure of uncertainty,paradox, and ambiguity. We must acknowledge that vitalpieces of information may always be missing. That is the price we payfor entering fully into the life of the cosmos, for becoming participatorsin nature instead of mere observers. Living in the universe gives usobligations and responsibilities. Each of our acts of observation will insome way disturb the universe and we must accept full responsibilityfor the consequences of these actions.Feeling Out TrendsThis does not mean that we must wash our hands of chaotic systems.While their fine details remain forever beyond us we may still be ableto detect patterns within their behavior that are not totally random.Stable systems, such as predator and prey (see the earlier example ofpike and trout), are in the grip of what scientists call an attractor. Justas a magnet attracts iron filings into a fixed pattern, so the attractor ofa complex system pulls its dynamics, or behavior, into characteristicrepetitive directions. Perturb the system and its attractor pulls it backon track. Attractors are a little like Jungian archetypes, always acting inthe background. If a person is in the grip of a particular archetype—the hero, the puer aeternis (eternal golden youth), the devouringmother—this will influence the pattern of behavior within relationships,work, and so on. Likewise knowing the shape of an underlyingattractor helps us to predict what a system’s behavior will be.Just as an attractor governs a stable system, so a chaotic system isgoverned by what is called a strange attractor. This means that, al-