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Inner Sanctum I

( Size: 51cm x 76cm Acrylic and collage on paper )

Inner Sanctum I

Leila Kubba Kawash 1997.

Complexity comment:

Complexity science inhabits a universe quite different than that familiar from everyday reality, it operates outside both space and time as usually understood, it exists beyond reality itself. Let us take a journey in an unreality bubble and float over this new universe of potential. Beneath us we have a landscape, rich in hills and valleys, these represent the choices we have in our world, all simultaneously present. The heights represent the values or fitnesses of each choice, so we are able to drift over this virtual world and seek out the highest peaks, the choices of greatest benefit to us.

This form of representation of possibility is derived from quantum theory, where the height of an event or choice related to its likelihood or probability. In that world a 4th dimension of space exists, but we will go beyond that into yet more dimensions, where heights are multi-variable value judgements, the fitnesses of evolutionary theory. This is the world of the Genetic Algorithm, a procedure for searching for the highest peaks, for navigating our bubble around this world. The fitnesses relate to combinations of genes, all interacting, all contributing to an overall value or truth. In this world we can shuffle the genes, create new combinations, using the technique of crossover, similar to the re-combination of sexual reproduction. Our landscape already contains all these possibilities, all these combinatorial potentials, fully laid out beneath us.

Let us descend and examine this world more closely. As we approach we find to our surprise that the peaks aren't smooth, within each major decision lie many lesser ones, and these in turn contain other nested decisions. This landscape is fractal, it is infinitely complex as befits a fitness calculation that must take into account every variable in our world and every choice available to our complex minds. Fitnesses here incorporate genetic, neuronic and social choices, as well as physical structures. When we land our bubble we actualise one possibility amongst millions, we make a choice, collapse the quantum wave function, freeze time itself. We enter normal reality... (continued on next page)

Page Version 1.0 June 1999
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