cas : cas presentations Dialogue: From Chaos to Pilgrimage November 5, 2001 Monday, 3:00 p.m. Music Room, Levis Faculty Center 919 W. Illinois St., Urbana University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 3:00 p.m. Opening Remarks Welcome: Masumi Iriye, Assistant Director, Center for Advanced Study Introduction: Pradeep Dhillon, Assistant Professor, Department of Educational Policy Studies 3:45 p.m. Emergent Geometries of Self-Organizing Systems: From Chaos to Pilgrimage J. McKim Malville Professor, Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences, University of Colorado at Boulder The presence of a strange attractor is an essential condition for chaos and for the growth of complexity in a self-organizing system. The system must be dynamic and "pulled or pushed" into self-transformation. It is energized by unpredictable, changing, and ambiguous forces which must never be terminated or neutralized: if the system is to remain dynamic its goal can never be reached. Pilgrimage has many dimensions and many levels of meaning for an individual participant. There clearly is a very powerful "attractor" to cause the pilgrim to journey far and undergo sometimes extreme physical hardships. In its ambiguity and multivalency, the attractor of pilgrimage shares features with the strange attractor of chaos theory. In his description of complex systems Cambel (1993: 4) comes close to a description of pilgrimage: "Complex systems dynamic and not in equilibrium; they are like a journey, not a destination, and they may pursue a moving target." 4:00 p.m. UIUC faculty discussion panel including: Andrew Pickering, Sociology Barry Lewis, Anthropology Tom Zuidema, Anthropology Donna Cox, Art and Design Brenda Farnell, Anthropology For further information on this Dialogue, please call 217 333-6279.