How you are in chaos theory

You Are," I suggest a way of thinking
mathematically about such a style of
being, a style of styles, or, simply, an
identity.
As long ago as the 1980s, people had
begun to see the flaws in
pharmacological approaches to mental
disorders. They were based on a linear
model of mental illness. That model
says that something goes wrong
somewhere in the linear sequence
from gene to receptor to dysfunction.
Instead, as more recent work shows,
we need to recognize that the brain is
a chaotic system. Reality is
continuously changing, and its
changes perturb our mental
functioning which is also continuously
changing. A small perturbation of our
brains produces waves and waves of
neuronal response. The initial
conditions of the neurons that we
bring to any given change in reality
will be varying wildly. Small changes in
reality can result in very large
changes in our experience, because
our reaction depends on the initial
conditions our brains bring to those
changes in reality, and those initial
conditions are constantly changing.
Behaviorally, we are here or there,
happy or unhappy, worried or secure,
alert or soporific, and so on. Each of
us responds differently even to
medications, to say nothing of novels,
movies, politicians, or any of the
myriad things that our culture and
environment bring us. Our brains
respond differently because they not
only differ from person to person but
their states vary from moment to
moment.
Grigsby and Stevens propose chaos
theory for mathematicizing our
characteristic defenses (and I would
extend the idea to identity, the
pervasive quality in all an individual's
particular behaviors). (Grigsby and his
colleagues were the first to suggest
this idea publicly, but my colleague
Murray Schwartz and I had speculated
along these lines before we knew of
Grigsby's work.)
According to chaos theory, one can
describe a chaotic system (like the
weather or our everyday behaviors) as
a myriad of energy states, some
requiring high energy, some low. If
you graph these on a plane, they
appear as a surface with high points,
hills, and low points, valleys between
the hills. The system will tend to
gravitate to the valleys. Hence they
are called "attractors" and sometimes
"strange attractors." (That doesn't
mean the people are strange, just the
attractors.)
We can think of our character,
including our defenses, as a
configuration of such attractors.
That is, we will tend to respond to the
ever-changing and random demands of
reality (chaos) in ways that involve
the least expenditure of energy. Our
mental state will roll down, as it
were, into the valleys. We will,
therefore, tend to repeat the valley
patterns of behavior.
Notice that this theory has much in
common with Freud's concept of a
repetition compulsion (Grigsby and
Stevens 2000, 317). Basically, if a
solution to a problem from reality
worked before (and even if it didn't),
try that solution first. That uses the
least brain energy.
We can think through, then, how you
are who you are in two ways. One, how
you are who you are consists of a
series of procedural memories widely
distributed in your brain. Together
they constitute the style of your
various styles, the style of your
being, your pervasive identity. Two ,
we can imagine your style of being
mathematically, as a configuration of
strange attractors in a three-
dimensional graph of your mental
states. How you are who you are
equals the way your momentary mental
states will gravitate to the valleys in
the configuration of mental states by
which a mathematician would
representquite simplyyou.
Items I've referred to:
Freud, Sigmund, Beyond the Pleasure
Principle, (1920g). Std. Edn. 8: 7-64.

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