“Intriguingly, the mathematics of randomness, chaos, and order also furnishes what may be a vital escape from absolute certainty—an opportunity to exercise free will in a deterministic universe. Indeed, in the interplay of order and disorder that makes life interesting, we appear perpetually poised in a state of enticingly precarious perplexity. The universe is neither so crazy that we can’t understand it at all nor so predictable that there’s nothing left for us to discover.”

— Ivars Peterson

Preface, “Infinite Possibility” (p. xiii)
The Jungles of Randomness: A Mathematical Safari (1997)

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Ivars Peterson 9

Canadian mathematician 1948

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“In the absolute universe all events can be regarded as absolutely deterministic, and if we can’t perceive the greater structures, it’s because our vision is faulty. If we had a real grasp of causality down to the molecular level, we wouldn’t need to rely on mathematical approximations, on statistics and probabilities, in making predictions. If our perceptions of cause and effect were only good enough, we’d be able to attain absolute knowledge of what is to come. We would make ourselves all-seeing.”

Robert Silverberg book The Stochastic Man

Source: The Stochastic Man (1975), Chapter 3 (p. 11)

“We want to know in order to make ourselves free. That is our life: one universal cry for freedom.”

Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902) Indian Hindu monk and phylosopher

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“We choose to believe in Ma'at. We create order out of chaos, beauty out of ugly randomness. That's what Egypt is all about.”

Rick Riordan book The Throne of Fire

Source: The Throne of Fire

“We require routine and tradition. That’s order. Order can become excessive, and that’s not good, but chaos can swamp us, so we drown—and that is also not good. We need to stay on the straight and narrow path.”

Jordan Peterson book 12 Rules for Life

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“There are no absolute certainties in this universe. A man must try to whip order into a yelping pack of probabilities, and uniform success is impossible.”

Jack Vance book The Languages of Pao

Source: The Languages of Pao (1958), Chapter 13 (p. 133)

“In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order.”

C.G. Jung (1875–1961) Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist who founded analytical psychology

In allem Chaos ist Kosmos und in aller Unordnung geheime Ordnung.
http://books.google.com/books?id=hOUkAQAAIAAJ&q=%22in+allem+Chaos+ist+Kosmos+und+in+aller+Unordnung+geheime+Ordnung%22&pg=PA41#v=onepage
p. 32 http://books.google.com/books?id=Yc5PlU9MyDwC&q=%22in+all+chaos+there+is+a+cosmos+in+all+disorder+a+secret+order%22&pg=PA32#v=onepage (1981 edition)
Originally presented http://books.google.com/books?id=-5oJAAAAIAAJ&q=%22in+allem+Chaos+ist+Kosmos+und+in+aller+Unordnung+geheime+Ordnung%22&pg=PA213#v=onepage at an Eranos conference. (1935)
The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (1934)

“We create order out of chaos, beauty and meaning out of ugly randomness.”

Rick Riordan book The Throne of Fire

Source: The Throne of Fire

“The ideal universe is a universe so ordered or natured as to allow its inhabitants to understand and dominate it sufficient to satisfy their desires, and inhabited by beings with desires so poised and assorted that there is not only not mutual inhibition of desires, but such a dovetailing and intertwining of the consciousnesses that there is mutual aid in the satisfaction of desire—a universe responsive to the whims of its inhabitants, and inhabited by beings socially harmonious and helpful.”

J. Howard Moore (1862–1916)

Source: Better-World Philosophy: A Sociological Synthesis (1899), The Social Ideal, p. 146

“The third of this kind of principles is : matter neither originates nor perishes; all the changes in the world concern form only; a postulate which on the recommendation of common sense has spread through all philosophical schools, not because it is to be taken as having been found so, or as having been demonstrated by arguments a priori, but because if we were to admit that matter itself is fleeting and transitory, nothing at all that is stable and lasting would be left any longer to serve for the explication of phenomena according to universal and perpetual laws, and hence nothing at all would be left for the exercise of the intellect.”

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) German philosopher

Kant's Inaugural Dissertation (1770), Section V On The Method Respecting The Sensuous And The Intellectual In Metaphysics

“Humans may crave absolute certainty; they may aspire to it; they may pretend, as partisans of certain religions do, to have attained it. But the history of science — by far the most successful claim to knowledge accessible to humans — teaches that the most we can hope for is successive improvement in our understanding, learning from our mistakes, an asymptotic approach to the Universe, but with the proviso that absolute certainty will always elude us.”

Carl Sagan (1934–1996) American astrophysicist, cosmologist, author and science educator

Source: The Demon-Haunted World : Science as a Candle in the Dark (1995), Ch. 2 : Science and Hope, p. 28

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Ivars Peterson 9

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