A chaotic world
Ben Elton reports of the existence of slobs: A type of person that squeezes the toothpaste tube in the middle, to subsequently leave off the top.
For some mysterious reason a lot of couples exist out of a sloppy specimen and a normal tidy person. According to Mr. Elton, the great number of divorces is caused by the fact that sloppiness is in the genes. Slobs can not be trained to become house-broken.
A greater difference between people than in the way they handle toothpaste, is whether one is defined or chaotic. The difference between these types of people is such that even a short relationship is not possible.
The defined person thinks there is a bi-directional relationship between every cause and event. He therefore thinks that everything is predetermined by a higher entity, and has no responsibility for his own behaviour. In general these people are very religious.
The chaotic person believes in free will, and that everything is more or less developed by coincidence.
Most people think that some things are predetermined, and other things happen by coincidence. However, these two approaches are so fundamentally different, that they can not be mixed. This can be shown by following argumentation:
Suppose we call the causes of an event it´s parents. It may be possible that there is a bi-directional relationship between an event and it´s parents. However if we track back the heritage (the parents´ parents etc.), you will always find some random factor, that makes any event accidental. Therefore everything must be either coincidental, or everything is pre-defined.
To clarify both approaches, I usually use the example of the pencil, set upright on it´s point.
According to the chaote the pencil will fall in a random direction, whereas the defined person will state that this direction is determined by the first air molecule that hits the pencil.
If I repeat the experiment in full vacuum, the chaote is still confident that the pencil will descend in any direction while the defined person thinks the pencil will stay in upright position (probably held in place by the higher entity).
JMM, May 1998
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