In my own research, I have found repeatedly that social interactions are complex and fractal. Specifically, if you look at repetitions in the order of who talks to whom and when during conversations, you will find branchlike structures, with very few patterns that repeat a lot, and many more that happen once or twice. Furthermore, the fractal patterns you find in verbal turn-taking as people talk correlates with control, closeness and conflict among the members. So if you have a strong leader, lots of repetitions will happen in conversation patterns involving the leader; if you have very close members of a group they will talk in more repetitive ways; and in conflict we all know that we get stuck and go round-and-round. We all know the familiar repetitions in the conversations of our families of origin, right? The more rigid and repetitive they are, the more enmeshed our family is, or the more lopsided it is in terms of power, or the more conflict-driven it is. On the other hand, when things are more open and unpredictable, this means that people can tolerate more distance, are more democratic with each other, or that there is less unresolved conflict.
Conflict is a really important process, regulating control and closeness. In fact, most if not all conflicts are about control or closeness, like "quite telling me what to do," "do what I say," (control) "leave me alone," or "don't leave me" (closeness). Experimentally, I induced conflict into a single person in a group (told her the other members found her cold and abrasive) and found that the fractal turn-taking patterns shifted rigid - like the branches falling off a tree. When they resolved the conflict the conversation ‘fluffed back up again,' with new growth. I have replicated these fractal results on many types of relationships, from group therapy members and families to new friendships. The fractal structure is always there, clear as day statistically speaking.
Altogether, these results suggest that individual personality is structured as a fractal, and that there is some self-similarity between the individuals and the groups they are in, like snowflake personalities joining together to make larger snowflake groups and so on. When a person gets rigid from some internal conflict, the group gets rigid and vice versa. Just like other fractals, the part is in the whole, and the whole is in the parts, up and down in an infinite manner. And change in one part, spreads up down and across such systems. If we wanted to stretch the scales from biology to the entire world, you could theoretically suggest that Hitler had a chemical ‘imbalance' (rigid process of neurotransimitter flow), which made his personality conflicted (i.e., malignant self loathing), which led to a rigid political movement (Nazis), which started a world-wide conflict (WW-II). This is how complexity theory works. Occasionally, very small events propagate within the fractal structure to become very large events: the straw that broke the camel's back, avalanches out of a snow flake, earthquakes out of a tiny platonic shift, and marriage ending conflicts over a trifle. Of course, timing is all important.
Okay - a bit of a tangent from the movie Batman, but I do have a point. Allow me to address Gomez's comment from my first blog entry about control and intentionality in our lives. He asked: "My question now is if our brain is constantly experiencing what we feel is our subjective future, are we stuck on our own non-linear ride through life? It seems to be that we are hardly aware of this momentum we have built up, yet daily we ride it out in our minds with the illusory preface of control. Any thoughts?"
Gomez, I can reply now with a quote from Hollis, Kloos and Van Orden (2008). They wrote one of the cognitive psyc chapters in our forthcoming book, Chaos and Complexity in Psychology: Theory of Nonlinear Dynamical Systems, from Cambridge University Press: "Sources of constraint for purposeful action exist throughout the body, including anticipatory movements and excitations, as well as dynamical processes of the body such as head position, posture, respiration, and digestion. At the extreme, sources of constraints even include the details of capillary red blood flow and local oxidation in muscle tissue. All these constraints combine to reduce the degrees of freedom for cognitive behavior and thus contribute to the fractal variation in cognitive activity."
What they are saying is that when we make an act of will, we choose along a fractal path. There are typically many ways to go, but not an infinite number. "Yes" to Gomez, our view of the subjective future (what he has called "nexting") does limit us. Along with our experiences in memory, the intricacies of the situation, the states of our bodies and details right down to head position or eye gaze. All of this combines to provide constraint on free will.
However, Hollis et al (2008) review the available research in fractal cognition which suggests that although all levels of cognitive behavior involve constraint, this constraint paradoxically allows for purposeful creativity. Constraint and free will combine (yet another example of a yin yang type of co-creative process). When a whole lot of constraints combine together, exchanging information, relating - they create a maze of unlimited options on a more holistic level.
A relationship example may make this more understandable. When you begin interacting with others, you are limited by many aspects of the interaction, roles, customs, politeness, the topic of conversation and so on. But together, you and the other interactants have unlimited possibilities for creating new patterns of relating. There are infinite subtle shifts in branches that you may take. So "no" to Gomez, momentum and imagining our next moves does not preclude self-determination. Rather, it facilitates it by removing the paralysis of having too many options to choose from. The batman would be a prime example of a complex, yet integrated human being. And in becoming "The Batman" he is both constrained, but also supremely in charge of his own destiny and his place in the world.
If you've hung on this long, please stay tuned for part III below, where we'll try to put this all together and bring it on home to a conclusion....
