I tried, for the longest
time, to come up with good examples of creative disorder. The thing I came up
with first was poetry, reasoning that the use of words to convey information in
ways that the words themselves usually don't was an example of disorder. This
seemed a little weak to me; after all, the words do have meanings, and
those meanings were used to build connections between ideas and feelings,
albeit it unexpected connections. The ``unexpected'' part seemed to be a
good candidate for an example of disorder, in that unexpectedness is, at the
least, a violation of an individual's preconceived order. There seems to
be a problem with equating ``unexpected'' with ``disordered,'' though. It just
doesn't sit well.
Then, as often happens, I
noticed the forest hiding amongst the trees.
Subjective experience was the thing that I was looking for. It breaks the rules
very nicely.
I mean, we have wonderful
chemical explanations for almost everything that goes on in our brains. None of
them even give even a hint of what red ought to look like.
We can build from molecular interactions to
cells to neurons to neural networks (if imperfectly). Nowhere in our rules does
the color red show up. It just pops in of its own accord. An alien without sight
could dissect a human to his heart's (?) content and never even catch a glimmer
of what it would be like to see the color red. The ``explanation'' of sight just
isn't there. The experience is subjective, the explanation isn't.
Hell, it can't be. Subjective experience is explicable in terms of
subjective experience only. If you don't have it, you don't understand it.
This, to me, is a proper kind of
disorder -- things popping up that the most comprehensive laws-of-everything
can't even allude to, throwing a divine monkey-wrench into any and all
attempts to pigeonhole existence.
The popular
catchphrase for when things that the rules don't predict show up is
``emergence.'' Gimme a Hail Eris.