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Inner Sanctum III

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

Inner Sanctum III

Leila Kubba Kawash 1997.

Complexity comment:

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The bubble has landed, we have made our choice and selected our fitness. Now what ? From whatever position we arrive at on our fitness landscape, from whatever position we start in life, we have choices, options which can be chosen either deliberately or at random. From our starting point we can change any one parameter or value to move slightly on the hill. These represent the mutations of evolutionary theory, small changes that we hope will move us higher in fitness, enabling us to climb the hill to achieve the peak fitness or adaptation represented by the summit. Each choice is a bifurcation or split in our trajectory or path through the world, but we have many such splits every minute, so the possible paths we have through life are infinite. We hope here for gradual improvement in our life, that each choice proves beneficial and not detrimental, taking us up the hill and not down into the depths of failure.

Yet the hill we inhabit is only one amongst the thousands dotted across our landscape. Sadly with our poor vision we often cannot see another hill, even if higher, we are stuck on our local optima, our choices seem limited, we have no way out. We need a technique to jump across the valleys and cling to a higher hill, a new quantum leap in our lifestyle. It is here we can ascend using our unreality bubble, we can stand back from our world and look through fresh eyes, seeing new possibilities all round. This combination of gradual improvement and sudden jumps pervades all evolutionary systems, from immune systems to galaxies, with society very firmly in the middle. At any time the landscape is what is known as a phase portrait, a snapshot of the possibilities currently open to us, but this is over simplistic, we have taken no account of time.

Viewing the world as static is a serious mistake. The height of the fitness hill I am climbing depends upon the decisions made by all around me, and as I make decisions and move around state space so do they. Their actions change the shape of my landscape and my actions change theirs. There is not a single landscape for all, but a separate one for every individual, animal, plant and object. All are interlinked, they co-evolve. We can view our landscape as undergoing constant earthquakes, the hills and valleys change size and places depending upon perturbations due to the actions of others. Our reality is not a fixed place, but a dynamic seething ecosystem where our every action affects everyone else in some way and their actions affect us also.

Page Version 1.0 June 1999
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