[MD] Crystallising Chaos.

[ian glendinning]

Case,

Not sure "ignored" is the right idea. That's a matter of choice and
purpose, culturally condtioned by "what's good".

Clearly stats play a big part in the chaotic / emergent view of
things, but what that does ... finding the significant patterns /
attractors / clusters etc ... also allows one to identify the few /
individual "outliers" and investigate their difference / significance.

Recognizing the non-conformists is the flip side to recognizing the
static patterns. Which you choose to focus on next is a matter of
conscious will. The "anomalies" are often more interesting than the
norms as I'm sure we'd agree.

It's the problem of lies, damn lies and statistics of rational logic
so beloved by the public face of communications (the media, politics
.... and capitalism) that tends to re-inforce the qualitive
distinction between norms (good) and anomalies (bad). The average (!)
scientist grows up in this culture too, just like the rest of us.

The problem of what people do is cultural / individual will.
Scientists merely enable within that context.
Ian

On 9/10/06, Case <Case at ispots.com> wrote:
> [Platt]
> Thanks for a interesting explanation of current chaos theory. While in
> recent years scientists have garnered a measure of predictability in
> previously unpredictable chaos systems, beyond a certain point discernable
> patterns go out of range of our cognitive tools -- the uncertainty principle
> being a prime case in point.  Add to that Godel's Incompleteness Theorem and
> you have two walls beyond which the human mind cannot as yet penetrate. To
> my mind, that unknown and so far unknowable territory beyond the walls is
> the realm of chaos.
>
> [Case]
> I guess the way I see it Gödel, uncertainty and chaos bring to center stage
> the elephant hiding under the carpet, the water in our fish bowl. I think it
> is fair to say that what we do as creatures is absorb information to
> structure the past so that we can model the future. We are successful as
> individuals and as a species to the extent that our models work. One of the
> insights that we should be getting out of these "new" ideas is that we can
> never achieve perfect prediction of the future and that future is neither
> predetermined nor predeterminable. There is no destiny, manifest or
> otherwise.
>
> [Platt]
> To throw in some political considerations as is my wont, it occurs to
> me that in looking at processes and systems scientists typically ignore
> or are bothered by the individuals within the system. For example, the
> one raindrop that doesn't follow the established chaotic pattern is
> considered an anomaly of no importance, or the one rapid faucet drip
> that constitutes the "slop" is consider undesirable and becomes
> regulated by an aerator. Carry over that mindset to the political realm
> is, IMO, very common and extremely dangerous to all who consider the
> individual human rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness
> to be unalienable. Pirsig's focus on a single individual, Lila, as the
> main foil in his metaphysics shows more than words that his disposition
> isn't anything like the  system/process oriented scientific view.
> Again, a matter of values.
>
> [Case]
> You are right that for the most part in modern society we are all treated as
> statistically objects. Telephone solicitors know that if they make enough
> calls someone will take whatever they offer. WalMart knows they can ignore
> specialized merchandise in favor what the average shopper needs. The entire
> capitalist enterprise is aimed at quantifying, pinpointing, stereotyping,
> labeling and ultimately selling something to you. I see the private sector
> as far more guilty in this regard than the public sector.
>
> But you rightly point out that outliers get ignored. This is sad because in
> the long run the highest good in evolutionary terms is diversity. We know
> what is working now but in the future things may be different and in fact
> the weirdos may inherit the earth. When T-Rex was, literally, looking down
> on the tree shrews, who would have thought that the rodents and primates
> would so soon be up to their eyeballs in dino skeletons? It is good to think
> outside the box least you get buried inside the box.
>
>
>
>
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