>

For some reason I've always liked subsets and populations. One of my earliest philosophical ponderings was whether Chaos contained Order.

Random > Predictable.

There was this game we used to play on the Acorn computers in computing in primary school. These were computers bought by selling computers that we won from coles reciept promotions and traded for computers that our school 'used'. Popular games were Xor and... that's about it.
Anyway there was this one game that was kind of an adventure game where you had all these animals that could help you out but you could only use them once. For example at one point you are in jail and you have a donkey which kicks down a wall.
Anyway at some other point you are in a dark cave and have to find the path by using a dragon which sings the right way. Otherwise you just have to guess.
You can go left, right or straight ahead. The path was randomized so each time you played the game it would be different.
Anyway as early as what must have been grade 4, this scenario inspired in me the notion that randomly, one time the path must come up as 'straight ahead' all 30 steps across the screen.
In other words the path as one would build it in real life. As straight and simple as possible.
So it occured to me, that even in all the most random path generations, random has the ability to be completely predictable.
Random is the same as predictable, but with more options.
Which isn't that profound.
What was profound to me was that you could tack something relatively simple, chaos, and then cut order out of it.
One fine example is potential vs. history. Looking forward in 'time' there are heaps and heaps of things that could concievably happen. All those variables. Looking back in time, even though there are various accounts of history that can provide present stimulus that is acted on, I'm pretty sure only one thing happened. And going forward only one thing actually can happen, even though to forcast what that one thing at any given moment will be is a task that is immensely beyond all our capabilities.
Interestingly later this same principle was drawn up in mathematical language. It's called the normal distribution. There is a formula for it which I won't reproduce but looks like this on a cartesian plane:



And right in the middle of it is the mean, which is a measure of central tendancy, and it basically is what you'd bet on any instance being as it is the most likely to occur.
Like if you had to guess what any given individual's IQ is without getting to meet the individual you should guess '100'
But from the above graph you can see that up either end are the extraodinarily unlikely outcomes of which are asymptotic (generally speaking) to the x axis, meaning that nothing usually has an absolute '0' chance of occuring. Which in other words is 'anything is possible'.
But as such what probably happens can be born out of completely random processes, in fact what has happened is just a small slice of all the various things that could have happened. There are millions of potential realities out there, we just live in one that seemed predictable because a lot has already happened, but such 'design' may infact just be heaps and heaps of randomness.
I guess it's the old 'give an infinite amount of monkeys an infinite amount of typewriters and they will eventually produce the complete works of shakespear.' I'm told the actual experiment on a relatively small number of monkeys demonstrated that for some reason monkeys particularly like the 's' key. But the > relationship remains, the complete works of shakespear, even though they make heaps of sense are a very very small predictable facet of a much greater body of random work.
THinking now I could probably calculate the odds of the complete works of shakespear with the right input data (like how many characters make up the complete work of shakespear and how many characters are there on a keyboard multiplied by the combination of keys such as shift + S to make the capitals) but I don't/can't be bothered figuring it out but with such a large number as infinity even though that makes it certain to produce the complete works of Shakespear people would probably proclaim it a miracle and what not.

Art > Science

This one came later. Furthermore, it seems to be the whole point of Art which by nature defies definition. I can't recall in what order the realisation was inspired but I really enjoy many of the ideas that point towards it.

Probably the first was Marcel Duchamp's 'The Fountain'



Before the Dada movement, it was generally accepted that 'legitimate' art was made by an artist and signed by the artist.
Duchamp took a Urinal and signed it 'R.Mutt' which shattered this definition. And yet it is still art. It was a guantlet thrown down to anyone who dared restrict art in any way shape or form.
Moving on from there you had conceptual art like Yoko Ono's, of whom I believe is one of the most talented artists ever. I believe Lennon first met Yoko when he climbed up a ladder and took a magnifying glass that hung from the ceiling to read the tiny lettering of the word 'Yes' which John Lennon found inspiringly positive enough a message to hit on the young artist.
If such things can be art 'pretentious though it is' anything can be art.
There are other works such as 'paper sphere' which was a scrunched up bit of paper, or Andy Warhol's pop-art factory.
These days there are exhibits where you can go and stare at nothing. Why there is even my own #86 which cannot be experienced.
Art is perhaps the only concept larger than the Universe itself. I'm not sure if it's possible. But I wouldn't be confident that Duchamp couldn't make a readymade out of the universe by simply signing it 'R.Mutt' and though it is as yet impossible for us to take in, perhaps he already has.
That said, there is nothing therefore to say that Science, the traditional antithesis of art is not therefore a subset of artistic endeavor. Because Science is intself something strictly defined and bound. There is the scientific method which largely consists of testing hypothesis to form conclusions based on evidence. That's all science allows. But nothing stops the 'manhatten project' from being performance art, or the Brooklyn Bridge from being installation art, or penicillin from being conceptual art. It still all adheres to science's discipline. But is it art? sure.
Much as above you can take all scientific knowledge and put it in art, but there's no way there's enough room in science for all of art, particularly #86.

Imagination > Experience

Is anyone beginning to see that all these things are more or less describing the same thing? As such maybe this will be my last one.
Basically we can simulate things which cannot be experienced. A case in point is the Matrix, we certainly can experience the Matrix, but before that happened the Wachowski brothers had to imagine it and along with the help of several computer type guys eventually put the pieces of the puzzle together to imitate their simulated experience enough that it could cue us visually to simulating something impossible in our minds such that it felt amazingly real.
Things like the sensation of flying, we can probably if we close our eyes now imagine a fairly decent sensation of air rushing over our backs faster than under our chests creating lift and what not.
We can imagine bazaars in foreign countries that we will never experience (we can, we might, but assume we don't).
We might also imagine things in our past that didn't actually happen, like when we acted like a dick and everyone noticed (except that they didn't). And so fourth.
But is experience a subset of imagination? Probably, you could probably imagine every experience you have actually had, making use of memory but then also using each experience to make up new experiences like say using the experience of decelarating to 0 on the upwards bounce on a trampoline to expand that over time and come up with the sensation of floating mid air.
It's cause and effect. Fun one's to try are turning the experience of hanging on some monkey bars into the imagined sensation of speghettification as you are sucked into a singularity.
Or holding your hand over a hot pan and turn it into the experience of being catapulted within 200 kilometers of the sun's surface.
At any rate I think imagination is bigger, but of all the relationships this one I don't think I can prove.
Imagination I suspect is sort of like the Universe.

See Uni means one, and verse means 'verse' so If you hit the previous limits of what was thought to be the Universe and discovered something else, then I imagine the 'universe' as a definition would have to shift and you would say something like 'Oh look more universe' much like if you tried to quantify the size of the imagination, it would also be an eternally shifting boundary.

But is Art bigger than even imagination?

There's a question. And perhaps #86 answers that.