What is a chaos dynamic system? A chaos dynamic system is a deterministic system that is very sensitive to initial conditions. That is, its future behavior is determined by its initial conditions. For example, human activities, appear to be random and unpredictable, but yet deterministic. Human activities are sensitive to a set of initial conditions: Sex (i.e., male or female), environment (i.e., tropical, arid or temperate), family background (i.e., the kind of family you’re born into), age (i.e., young or old) etc. Thus, human activities are chaos dynamic systems. Weather and war are also good examples of chaos dynamic systems.
In order to fully explain how free will is a binary choice of day to day human activities, I must make a clear distinction between randomness and chaos. I shall illustrate this with a simple example. Let us say I get up every morning and engage in a plurality of daily activities: wake up, get ready for work, buy gas for my car, drive to work, eat breakfast, walk into the office, attend a meeting, have lunch, work in the office, leave work, drive to the gym, work out, prepare dinner, eat dinner, talk on the phone, read and go to bed. Without further explanation, one can see that my daily activities are totally chaotic and filled with binary choices (i.e, the free will of “to do” or “not to do”). In other words, I have the free will of waking up on time to go to work or staying home in bed and not go to work – the choice is mine. So, let us say I decided to wake up and go to work, but on my way to work I decided to pump some gas into my car. While at the gas station, I quickly decided to buy $1 lotto ticket and to my amazement, I won $1 Million dollars.
My decision to buy a lotto ticket at the gas station and my eventual winning of $1 million dollars were totally random because they were independent of initial conditions. Although, I decided to get the lotto ticket while I was fulfilling one of my chaotic daily activities, that decision was random at best. Based on this simple illustration, I can conclude that chaos dynamic systems, like human activities are not totally deterministic because they have some degree of randomness (i.e., free-will binary choice of “to do” or “not to do”). And, it is this randomness (i.e., corrupting noise) that makes chaos dynamic system, though deterministic, very difficult to predict.
How does Ifa divination fit into all of these interesting observations? The role of Ifa divination is to track free will (i.e., a binary choice of 0 or 1, male or female, yin or yang), and to reduce randomness (i.e., corrupting noise) in a chaos dynamic system so as to accurately predict human activities. According to the Yoruba pantheon, our world is a chaotic market place (Aye loja), created on the binary fortune of good and misfortune of evil (Tibi tire la da ile aye), where good character (IWA PELE) and Ise (hard work) bring us closer to good fortune. And, it is out of this chaos-dynamic material world of universal opposites emerged free will as a binary choice.
Ifa priests, in their infinite wisdom, use the binary power of Ifa divination system (i.e., even or odd count) to formulate the binary free will choices people make every minute or even second, reduce the randomness in human activities, and predict accurately future human activities based on a set of initial conditions. For example, let us say I want Ifa to tell me what would happen to me in five hours from now. Five hours is a long time from now. In five hours’ time, I will have made a series of binary free will choices that will have introduced randomness (i.e., error/noise) into my activities, making it difficult for Ifa to accurately predict my state/condition.
So what does Ifa do to circumvent this problem? Ifa picks a series of nearby states to my current state/condition and use the geometric coefficients of 2^n (i.e., 1, 2, 4, 8, 16,…..256) as place holders for each of these nearby states – this geometric series of 2^n is called "ODU ifa." In other words, to predict what would happen to me in five hours, it would make more sense to predict what would happen to me in 30 minutes first and geometrically expand my time series to cover five-hour period. The first 30-minute "prediction state" in the series is called the nearby state since it is the closest chosen state to my current/initial state.
In conclusion, the ability of Ifa divination system to make accurate predictions in a chaos dynamic system rests on its binary power and its vast 2^n geometric state-holding coefficients. Understanding the dichotomy between chaos and randomness is key to understanding the dichotomy between classical physics and quantum mechanics and I suspect Ifa system or its principles would one day unify both.
copyright 10/5/2012.
Wonderful!
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