Chaos

Some time in the 80's, a mathematician came up with an equation to predict the results of a mass-scale rubella vaccination in the US. Before I delve into that, here's a question for you. What would you predict as the outcome of a mass-scale vaccination?

If you're like me, you'd probably expect the incidence of rubella to fall. No rocket science there. It's the obvious, intuitive thing to expect.

Well, it turns out that things didn't quite happen that way in real life. According to the mathematician's equations, a perturbation to the "system" such as a mass-scale vaccination would actually cause large-scale swings in the incidence of the disease. That's exactly what happened. The incidence of the disease rose in the short-term.

Usually, when weird anomalies like this happen, the relevant authorities dismiss it, attributing it to factors out of their control. In this case, doctors probably would have said that a bad batch of vaccines was to blame. However, just the fact that mathematics predicted that the swings would happen shows that life is not as intuitive as we expect(big surprise). The fact of the matter is that there were no unknown factors...no bad batches of vaccine or medical negligence, or other vague theories. The end line is that the rise in the incidence happened because that's the way nature works.

By the way, the branch of mathematics that proved this is...you guessed it...chaos theory.

So to get to where I'm going...the fact (and somewhat of a tragedy) of life is that our minds think in a simple, intuitive, linear way, and the world around us is extremely non-linear and chaotic. That's why there's always a clash between what we expect and what happens. That's why love never works out the way we expect, why relationships bloom and suffer, why moods rise and fall. Because our thinking is too linear and simplified for this world.

Plato had proposed something similar with his notion of the platonic world. According to plato, our minds are still "stuck" in a platonic world...a place we lived in before we were born and where everything was "perfect." That's why there's always such a clash between our ideals and the world. Between the simplified linearity of our minds and the chaos around us.

My question is...why? Why make our brains misfits for this world? Why the disparity between the fuzzy lands of our minds and the even fuzzier vat we are floating around in?