Butterfly and the Uncertain World

We visited San Antonio during the holiday break and I was able to snap a few photos of a beautiful monarch butterfly when we were walking around the Pearl district. As I was putting the photos together, a few thoughts about butterfly came to my minds.

The first thought about butterfly was a famous dream by an ancient Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi who lived around the?4th century BC. He is credited with writing—in part or in whole—a work known by his name,?the?Zhuangzi, which is one of the foundational texts of?Taoism. According to the text, he once went to sleep and dreamed that he was a butterfly. He dreamt that he was flitting and fluttering around from flower to flower. While he was dreaming he felt free and happy with himself and doing as he pleased. He was quite sure that he was a butterfly. But when he awoke he realized that he had just been dreaming, and that he was really Zhuangzi dreaming he was a butterfly. But then Zhuangzi asked himself the following question: "was I Zhuangzi dreaming I was a butterfly or am I now really a butterfly dreaming that I am Zhuangzi?". The philosophical question by Zhuangzi was very similar to the thoughts of René Descartes (1596–1650), French philosopher and mathematician. Descartes philosophy was built on the idea of radical doubt. The only thing that remains true is that there is a consciousness doing the doubting and believing its perceptions, hence the famous formulation, ‘I think therefore I am’. There are different interpretations of the question raised by Zhuangzi. One interpretation focuses on the pursuit of the connection between “the real world and the spiritual realm" while other interprets the dream as a way to describe the continuous transformation of the external world.

This also reminds of a scene in the original Jurassic Park movie when mathematician Ian Malcolm (by Jeff Goldblum) predicts the downfall of the dinosaur park by using the analogy of the so called “butterfly effect” from chaos theory, the idea that small changes in complex systems can have big and unpredictable effects. An often cited quote about chaos theory is that a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil can cause a tornado in Texas.?Chaos theory studies the apparently random or unpredictable behavior in systems governed by deterministic laws. It tells you is that you cannot predict very far ahead successfully in a complex system. You have to expect things to fail, and you have to be ready to make adjustments.

Both the ancient Zhuangzi dream parable and the modern chaos theory associate butterfly with dynamic changes and uncertainties. Next time when you see a butterfly, you might want to think beyond the beautiful flapping wings but what this small insect could mean for our decision making in this uncertain world.

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