Chaos Theory

Humans have always tried to make sense of their surroundings by categorizing things into patterns. The brain must do this to process the external stimuli around it, to discern what is a change in environment that could threaten it's existence. If it doesn't, it would quickly get overwhelmed with the moving parts around it. It would cease to recognize a face for a face and would see it as a mouth, eye, nose, cheeks, etc. We are trained to recognize patterns and to fit incoming information into these patterns. When we don't, we can feel overwhelmed. This extends into our social environment as well. When a racial stereotype is broken, often we disregard this example because it doesn't fit into our box of how this category of people behaves. We accept data that backs up our deepest assumptions and disregard data that challenges this. In the same way, chaos - things, actions, phenomena that doesn't fit neatly into an understandable and anticipatory pattern, disturbs us. Hence we call it chaos, something that is out of control, unknowable. 

Somehow we have managed to collect the data from fractal patterns (irregular phenomena) and have processed it with computers to identify patterns among the irregularity, producing patterns, allowing us to say "look! there is a pattern within the chaos!" We will never stop looking for patterns because this is how our minds process data, but philosophically we must also know the importance of embracing contractions and accepting that most things in this world are unknowable.